I’ve written about rationality and voting before, but I still see some confusion out there (for example, in some of the discussion here). Our discussion is here (with longer article here). But let me try to clarify briefly right now.

I do not claim that voting is always rational or even mostly rationally motivated. What I do object to is the claim that voting is essentially never rational. For someone living in a swing state who cares about the outcome, I think voting in the presidential election is a very rational thing to do: a small cost and something like a 1-in-10-million chance of altering the history of the world. It’s certainly a bet I’d be glad to take.

But I’ll be voting in New York, where my vote has almost zero chance of making a difference, so why do I do it? Not for instrumentally rational reasons. I do it for the usual reasons of civic duty, supporting the legitimacy of the electoral process, etc. Again, I’m not saying that all voting or even most voting is rational but that voting can be rational in many important settings (including presidential voting in Ohio, and congressional and senatorial voting in all sorts of places).

I’d also like to address the objection that sometimes arises (for example, in here) that one vote never makes a difference, because if the election were decided by one vote, there’d be a recount anyway. This argument is wrong, as we discuss in the appendix to this article (turn to page 674) for details. We discuss how our decisive-vote calculations are reasonable, even for real elections with disputed votes, recounts, and so forth. We show this by setting up a more elaborate model that allows for a gray area in vote counting, and then demonstrating that the simpler model of decisive votes is a reasonable approximation.

Politics doesn’t stop at the shower’s edge.

This is cool (from France-Amerique).

Matthew Yglesias asks what my coauthors and I think of this article by George Packer on white working class voters in Ohio. (This is the same issue of the New Yorker where our book is briefly noted.)

I have a few thoughts on Packer’s article. First, it’s definitely a struggle for me to relate to the people interviewed there. For example, it says that Barbie Snodgrass used to buy 8 bags of groceries each week and now, “because of inflation,” only buys 4 bags. But the price of food can’t have doubled! And she presents going out “for a McDonald’s Dollar Meal” as chepaer than “spending seven dollars on a bag of potatoes and cooking at home.” First off, how big is that bag? Even in Manhattan, a 5-pound bag of potatoes costs a lot less than $7. Second, such a bag wil supply you with enough food for many many meals. I agree that a Happy Meal or whatever can be convenient, and I bet it’ll make the kids happy, but no way is it cheaper than cooking potatoes at home.

At some level, I can follow this–after all, here I am blogging at $0/hour, so I understand that not all activity is economically rational–but I have to admit that I don’t have a great framework for making sense of this person’s attitudes. (If I’d been conducting the interview, I would’ve asked Snodgrass how she could think that cooking a bag of potatoes is more expensive than going to McDonalds. But that probably just means that I don’t know the first thing about interviewing.)

OK, enough of that. For my discussion of the voting data, see here. Richer voters remain Republican, and that’s true even if you restrict the analysis to whites:

And here are the trends. David Park made this graph of what’s been happening since the 1950s with the rich-poor voting gap (the difference between Republican vote share among the upper third of income, minus the Republican vote share among the lower third) in Presidential elections. The gray dots represent all voters, the black dots represent whites only (yes, I know, they should be white dots…).

The rich-poor voting gap among whites has in recent elections been a bit below its 1970s-1990s peak, but it’s far from zero. Yes, it’s different rich and poor people than before, but it’s still there. It’s a mistake to think there was a past golden era of class-based voting. Geographic factors were important in voting decades ago, and they are now as well.

Here’s a fun discussion (still developing, it’ll be going through Thursday, I think) on red and blue America, featuring pollster John Zogby, journalist Bill Bishop, consultant Valdis Krebs, and myself, moderated by Tom Nissley at Amazon.com.

My strategy is to make my points using graphs.

This past year, I’ve been working on working on figuring out the ideological preferences of state legislators in comparative perspective. Thanks to Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, we’ve known how liberal or conservative members of Congress are to each other since the late 1980s. Using all non-unanimous roll call votes and a statistical procedure known as ideal point estimation, they’ve been able to construct a common metric for measuring the ideology of politicians. While this measure scores legislators in two ideological dimensions, most attention is paid to the dominant first dimension, which is taken to be a linear scale of liberalism-conservatism. It turns out that this one scale is enough to predict legislative issue preferences on the vast majority of issues.

But state legislators have been–unfairly in my opinion–left out. This is despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans across state legislatures are far more diverse than are the parties across state congressional delegations. Just think of Louisiana and South Carolina Democrats, and compare them to Connecticut and Massachussetts Republicans.

My research on state legislatures in the past year has been aimed at addressing this problem. The key issue is that state legislative agendas are very different, so comparing them is very difficult. I get around this problem using two techniques: 1) relying on state legislators who “graduate” by being elected to Congress later in their careers (like Obama), and 2) the Project Votesmart NPAT questionnaire asked of candidates for Congress and state legislatures for the past decade.  Doing so has allowed me to put all members of Congress and incumbent state legislators for most states on a common scale since approximately the mid 1990.

This research is personally fascinating for me as a relative newcomer to the Land of Lincoln. My home city’s and state’s politics are, umm, legendary, and do not lack for colorful characters.

But, in this election year, the most interesting current or former state legislator is undoubtedly Senator Barack Obama from Illinois. While the National Journal has rated him the most liberal member of the Senate in 2007, the methodology that generated this result is suspect (as it was in 2004). I’d turn instead to the results of the far superior Poole-Rosenthal NOMINATE ideal point estimation algorithm, which finds Obama to be one of the more, but not the most, liberal Senators (just slightly to the left of Senator Clinton).

But what about Obama’s service in the Illinois General Assembly representing Hyde Park? How liberal was he then? So far, it’s been quite difficult to tell. Of course, both sides of the political debate have strong incentives to spin his record; the Democrats want to portray him as more centrist, the Republicans more liberal. During the primary campaign, Clinton attempted to critique Obama as insufficiently liberal, pointing to his voting “present” on a number of controversial topics.

So what’s the truth? The answer: Obama as an Illinois state senator was very liberal, but there were others substantially more liberal still. Of all 295 incumbents who served from 1996-2004 in Illinois, State Senator Obama ranked in the 14th percentile on my liberalism scale. In the Democratic party, he ranked in the 27th percentile. Comparing Obama to all incumbent state legislators in the United States in the mid 1990s to the mid 2000′s, he was in the top 11th percentile. He was about as liberal as James Meeks, pastor and Illinois state Senator. Obama was more liberal than Emil Jones, the president of the Senate and one of Obama’s political mentors, is not as liberal as his protege, ranking in the middle of his party for liberalism, and in the top quarter of the Legislature as a whole. Michael Madigan, the Speaker of the Assembly, is slightly more liberal than Obama, ranking in the top 16 percent of his party and in the top 8 percent of the legislature as a whole.

It appears statewide-office holding Democrats tend to be far more conservative than their purely legislative colleagues, which makes sense given how liberal Cook County is relative to the state as a whole. Rod Blagojevich, current governor (and former state legislator and member of Congress), is a rather conservative Democrat, ranking in the top third of his party for leaning to the right (but in the top third of overall legislative liberalism). Lisa Madigan, current Attorney General, former legislator, and potential future gubernatorial candidate (not to mention Michael Madigan’s daughter), is interesting in her rather extreme conservatism for a Democrat. She is in the rightmost 1% of the party, and even in the top 12% of the legislator as a whole. That is to say, she is more conservative than many Republicans in the legislature. She is even more conservative than most state legislators around the country.

I have examined Democrats in this post, but I’ll look at Republicans soon, too.

Technical footnote: in the interests of brevity, I’ve ignored here the fact that these scores are estimated, and thus are measured with error. However, it turns out that these errors are relatively small, thanks to the hundreds or more roll call votes legislators can expect to cast in their career.

I was interviewed by Phil Ponce on Chicago Tonight, one of WTTW’s (Chicago Public Television) prime time programs on politics and culture. This was done on Thursday night at 7pm, live. A little nervewracking, but I think it came out ok. I have another TV interview with WNBC on Tuesday.

Amazon.com has this cool website showing which sorts of political books people are buying in which states:

What struck me was the similarity of this to the “voting patterns of the rich” map from our book:

I wonder what data from Wal-Mart from Wal-Mart would look like. Maybe like one of the lower of the two maps? I’m not sure, though, since, even at Wal-Mart, buyers of political books are more politically active and thus maybe more like “rich people” in their red-blue divisions.

There’s a lot going on for those of you in the NY/NJ area.

1. On Monday morning I’m doing an activity on the Electoral College. But you can’t come to that unless you’re a 4th grader in Zacky’s school.

2. Monday 4.30pm at room 801 International Affairs Building (at Columbia), I’m speaking on Red State, Blue State in an event cosponsored by the Columbia Journalism School, with discussions by Nicholas Lemann and Thomas Edsall and moderated by Sharyn O’Halloran.

3. Monday 7pm at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan, I’m speaking and signing books. You can only go to this one if you’re a member of the club, I think.

4. Tuesday 4.30pm at Robertson Hall at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, there’s an event sponsored by the New York and New Jersey chapters of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, featuring Joe Lenski, Chris Achen, Larry Hugick, and myself. After the panel there will be lots of time for informal discussion as well.

Katy Gartside pointed me to this site. It’s fun to see the new states gradually being added as the years go on. Here was the exciting 1796 election. (At that time most people weren’t allowed to vote.)

And here’s the Twentieth Century Reversal. First, the McKinley-Bryan matchup of 1896:

Red states in the northeast, upper midwest, and west coast; blue in the south, plains, and mountain west. That sounds right . . . hey, wait a minute!

Let’s go to the Bush-Gore map from 2000. The red states have switched to blue and vice-versa:

See here for more on the Twentieth Century Reversal, including some scatterplots. It turns out that, at the local level, it was not a simple switching of red to blue or a simple switching of party positions.

P.S. The historical maps on the above-linked site are great, but don’t take the probabilities on the site seriously.