> It's really not hard to understand.
Then my understanding of their method, outlined in my earlier note, was accurate?
> The two parties used to have liberal and conservative wings. They
> don't anymore. The Reps are very conservative, with no centrists or
> liberals, and the Dems vary from centrist to liberal, and almost no
> conservatives.
Clearly the last statement is not true; cf. the notorious Blue Dogs.
What the research shows is simply that if you add up the the votes, rated on a liberal/conservative scale, then even a Blue Dog has a lower lifetime right-wing batting average than the most liberal Republican. Mmm. So what does this imply, exactly?
> I know this violates your foundational
> assumptions, but it really seems to be true.
It doesn't actually -- partly because I don't think I have any 'foundational assumptions', and partly because the result doesn't contradict any conclusions I may have reached.
Non-overlap on cumulative voting records doesn't seem like a very informative proxy for anything, except perhaps the character of the party system ('parliamentary' or otherwise).
And it doesn't say anything at all about the actual effective difference between the parties, nor about how 'policy' is actually made. Right-wing Democrats can dependably bolt across the aisle on every vote of consequence and still have lifetime averages that lie slightly to the 'liberal' side. And both parties can be moving steadily rightward the whole time, an effect which is of course normalized out by the method chosen.
You know the old joke about the unfortunate statistician -- drowned in a creek whose average depth was six inches?
-- --
Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com http://cars-suck.org