Ideology and the Auto Bailout

December 12th, 2008, by Boris

Political scientist (and coauthor) Nolan McCarty at Princeton nails the Senate cloture vote on the nose on his new blog. only 52 aye votes. His prediction is based on the highly ideological character of these types of bailout votes: liberals are far more likely to vote yes, conservatives are far more likely to vote no. While there are some exceptions, these appear to be the function of idiosyncratic factors like lame duck status and home state. In fact, the key difference between the House and Senate votes (apart from the failure of the cloture vote) is the geographic concentration of the big 3. In the House, Midwestern Republicans voted in favor of the bailout — but there aren’t that many Midwestern Republicans in the Senate; each state gets just two, after all. It can’t have helped, for example, for Mitch McConnell, a Republican from a very weak union state, to oppose the bailout.

The larger lesson here, however, is the power of ideology in explaining voting outcomes. Good thing I’m teaching a class on ideology in the spring!

Similar Posts:

• Left-right ideology of voters, congressmembers, and senators
• What happened in the Congressional vote?
• Low-turnout runoff elections; skepticism about the “balancing” argument
• Answers to questions about our graphs of left-right ideology of voters, congressmembers, and senators
• The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008 U.S. House Election

Entry Filed under: Ideology,Political parties