I’d also like to see the raw statistics on these graphs as well on the individual questions that you used to derive them, and will buy the book if they are in it.

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Finally, re: “Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy?”, I sense that such studies don’t consider either the primaries or the voter turnout. I understand the tenancy to move toward the median, but the problems I see are:

1) Candidates are selected in the primaries, and the primary voters tend to vote their heart, thus there is a cost for the “extreme” candidate to flip-flop when they run for the election. Thus even if they would benefit by being close to the median, the lose by moving.

2) Though a candidate would pick up people who would prefer them by moving toward the median, they would lose the intensity of the people who they are moving away from. This means that as they move away from their base they loose their precinct workers and even some of their base voters who say, “If the candidate are not going to be be true Blue/Red, to the hell on both of them” .. My thought is if the voter turnout is also dependent on the closeness of the candidate to the voter, then the candidate has more reason to stay closer to their base.

That view reflects a rather myopic fiscal perspective. If one defines budget balance as: PV of exhaustive spending ? {(assets – debts) + PV (taxes – transfers)}, where PV denotes the present value of a cash flow, the SSI reforms carried out under the Reagan administration were highly fiscally conservative, although entirely on the revenue side. The kicker in this analysis is that the 1986 Tax Reform, which was intended to be revenue neutral, greatly and largely inadvertently reduced taxes on folks who own very lucrative ’small’ businesses.

Alan: Yes, I can believe that the center of gravity has changed in recent years. It’ll be interesting to check back in 2012 on some of these trends.

Phil: I’d love for you to buy our book and read chapter 8, but actually a lot of the numbers to answer your question are in my paper with Delia linked to above. Although we didn’t actually do a Catholic/Protestant breakdown.

Donna: As you can see from the graph above, “socially liberal and economically conservative” is a minority position but you’re certainly not alone. I completely agree that the two parties simply can’t represent everyone.

Anne: Looking with your eyes is useful but it’s only giving you local information. Statistics give you a big picture. Neither quantitative nor qualitative evidence is enough on its own. In addition, I have a blind colleague and we’ve been talking about developing improved statistical methods that allow people to visualize data without using their eyes.

That said, the success of an administrative policy depends on more than where it stands on a left-right scale. For example, when it came to implementing conservative policies, Reagan had more success with tax cuts than with budget cuts.

Two related questions: Do there exist in the American electorate two sets of highly correlated policy positions that we could really label “left” and “right,” and to what degree do the party platforms correspond to those sets of policy positions?

Weighting of positions seems very important; Catholic voters might generally hold a very leftist set of positions, then vote Republican over abortion, and a lot of conservatives seem to be very uncomfortable with Republican budgeting, but it has taken some truly mammoth deficits to see any of them vote Democrat.

My own very unscientific sense is that very few Americans feel completely comfortable with the major planks in either party’s platform, and that most people are neither “left” nor “right” in our current notions of the words, nor even center (in the sense of supporting compromises between left and right positions) but are instead pragmatic — picking positions that range from hard left (“Strong protection for constitutional rights…”, “Universal health care…”) to hard right (“…including the Second Amendment!” “…and an end to abortion!”). What does the data say?

Please excuse me if the answer is “read the book.”

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/18/14164/549/31/634595