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!

Today brings news of the arrest and indictment of Rod Blagojevich, Democratic governor of my home state of Illinois. What does this mean for the appointment of a candidate to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat?

Since Blagojevich is still the governor, he still has the right by state law to make the appointment. Remember, Ted Stevens ran for re-election even after being convicted on corruption charges (though he lost, despite being a mythic figure in Alaskan political history). Indeed, the prosecution and trial of Blagojevich is likely to take a long time. And state law imposes no deadline on the appointment, unlike other states. So he could just proclaim his innocence and wait it out. But it is difficult to imagine who would want the job if it meant being appointed by Blagojevich now.

What’s interesting is the role of ideology in the appointment process. My research on state legislative ideology revealed how remarkable Blagojevich was in the context of the Illinois Democratic Party. Given his Congressional and state legislative voting record, he ranks in the more conservative third of his party. See here for more details. (Of course, he’s no Lisa Madigan, who is one of the most conservative Democrats in the party.)

If the Governor resigns or is impeached, Lt. Governor Pat Quinn will be elevated to the governorship and acquire the right to make the appointment. This is potentially consequential because of two factors. First, according to the indictment, Blagojevich was considering nominating himself if others wouldn’t “play ball” and give him or his wife some plums in return for the pick. Given that nobody would be stupid enough to make a deal with a governor that has been under investigation for years, and combine that with a governor crazy enough to believe he could make a run for President in 2016 (!), that self-pick was indeed a possibility.

So Blagojevich’s indictment prevents his elevation of himself (or anyone else), clearing the way for a more liberal pick by Pat Quinn. Quinn does not have a voting record, so we can not (yet) be sure of his ideological leanings. But making the “conservative” prediction that (s)he will be about as liberal as a median Democrat indicates that his pick, if made on ideological grounds, would more conservative than the pick Blagojevich would have made were the choice his.

Update: See here from Steve Kass. Apparently the researchers below made a mistake in reading the data. That sort of thing happens sometimes–that’s one reason it can be helpful to post things on a blog, so that people can catch mistakes.

My bad in not screening this more carefully before posting. In defense of Subramanian and Perkins, they sent me the paper and it was my idea to blog it. They were planning all along to do more systematic analysis of the raw data (which they haven’t yet received).

S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write:

The prevalence of poor self-rated health was substantially higher among Democrats (25.8%) as compared to Republicans (8.5%). Lower prevalence of poor health among Republicans was also observed in analyses stratified by poverty, education or race. The prevalence of self-rated poor health among poor Democrats or Black Democrats or Democrats with less than high school education were 3 – 14 times higher than comparable Republicans, suggesting that the observed differences in health status by political ideology may not be due to confounding by race or socioeconomic status:

These patterns remain in conditional linear regression models where self-rated health is modeled as a function of political ideological bent (ranging from strongly Democrat to strongly Republican) adjusted for age, sex, race, marital status, income, poverty, education, smoking and religious affiliation.

We also found that more than twice as many Democrats smoke (16.7%) compared to Republicans (7.1%). The prevalence of smoking among poor, less than high school education, or Black Democrats is 3 to 20 times the smoking prevalence among Republicans (see above).

The observation that Republicans enjoy better health status may reflect the core Republican value of individual responsibility, which could translate into increased adherence to health-promoting behaviors. It is also likely that Republicans tend to exhibit greater religiosity compared to Democrats.5 This could lead to health promoting social conditions, such as enhanced social ties and networks, in part facilitated through increased attendance in places of worship.

Our observations should not be interpreted to suggest that a Republican government necessarily equals better health. It would be erroneous to draw macro inferences based on individual-level correlations. Indeed, the question of which type of political ideology, reflected at the government-level, is better for population health or for reducing health disparities are entirely different queries. At the same time, our findings suggest that certain aspects of Republican ideology may implicitly be health enhancing for the individual. The healthier status of Republicans might also explain, perhaps, why they place lower priority on health care.

Interesting. S.V. said they’re waiting to get the raw data so they can run logistic regressions.

P.S. Let me add a few thoughts based on the comments below and at my other blog:

1. To the extent that difference in smoking rates are that large, this would be a big part of the story. But are smoking rates really so low among those groups of Republicans? Perhaps some mistake? I’d really want to look into this before going further.

2. To the extent that the above (or similar) patterns are actually occurring, I think they’re interesting, even if they’re explained by reporting bias or by experiences or by differences between people in big cities and elsewhere, or whatever. As S.V. noted in his article, differences in perceived health–even if explainable by biases–could result in differences in attitudes toward health policy in general.

Two interesting articles in Newsweek:  Jon Meacham writes that “America remains a center-right nation,” and Jonathan Alter replies that “we’re heading left once again.” Here’s Meacham:

So are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. . . . nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996). . . . In California, at least one poll suggests that social conservatives may pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot proposition next month . . .

And here’s Alter:

Jon Meacham is right that by the standards of a European-style welfare state, we will always be a relatively conservative country. But closer to home, the norm has not been consistently conservative over the course of the 20th century. If anything, the nation was more often center-left. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives—the “People’s House”—for six straight decades between 1930 and 1994 (with only a short exception). While many were Southern conservatives on race, the huge chunks of progressive legislation they swallowed over many years could choke an elephant. . . .

A methodological comment

And now here’s me. Before getting to the data on voters’ ideologies, let me make a brief methodological comment. Meacham’s point that Republicans have been winning presidential elections is relevant; in fact, before 1994 there was an ongoing discussion within political science as to how the Republicans were consistently winning the presidency while being in the minority in party identification and congressional voting. (From 1994-2004, the two parties split the congressional vote roughly evenly. From 1950-1992 and again in 2006 (and probably in 2008 as well), it’s been a pretty consistent 55% for Dems and 45% for Reps. See the lower graph at this link.) So, yes. But Meacham’s comparison is misleading in that he’s treating the election outcomes as yes/no measures of public opinion. But surely if the essentially-tied 1968, 1976, and 2000 elections tell us anything about public opinion, it is that it was evenly divided in these years, not that America was left or right. Counting the winner is a common mistake people make in studying elections. Yes, for policy concerns it is the winner that matters more than the vote margin, but for studying public opinion it is a different story.

A more important point, though, which both Meacham and Alter raise in different ways, is that ideology is relative to current standards; given that the parties can shift positions (if only gradually at times), it is no surprise that they find themselves not too far from current voters. For example, is it really a sign of conservatism that 50% of Californians think gay marriage is OK? Similarly, if Obama raises the tax rate on the top bracket to 40%, would this really represent a triumph of liberalism? The center has moved a lot, in different ways, over the past few decades.

And now for some data

From Michael Herron and Joe Bafumi (and in chapter 8 of our book), here are estimates of the distributions of voters, House members, and senators on a common scale:

House members and senators’ positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress. Voters’ positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress. As you can see, elected representatives are generally more extreme than voters. (See here for versions of the above graph broken down by red, purple, and blue states.)

In light of recent American politics, this pattern makes sense: congressmembers generally vote with their parties, very few conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans remain in the House or the Senate, and, as Delia and I have shown, voters’ positions on issues are much more of a mixed bag. Voters may be to the left of the Democratic party or to the right of the Republican party on specific issues, but, on the whole, most voters don’t have that sort of ideological consistency.

More data on voters’ ideologies, this time in comparison to how they perceive Bush and Kerry, is in chapter 9 of our book, originally from my paper with Jeff Cai. Here’s the graph showing how a random sample of a thousand or so Americans in October, 2004, perceived Bush, Kerry, and themselves on a set of economic and social issues (i.e., respondents were asked about particular issues, not about general “liberal” or “conservative” labels):

There was a lot of spread; on average, though, voters saw themselves as between the two candidates. (See the graph on the right, in which K and B represent respondents’ average assessments of where Bush and Kerry stood on these issues.)

At the beginning of the year I had an exchange with an economist who interpreted the polls to say that American opinion is to the left of the middle of the Democratic party. His point was that, although Americans are much more likely to label themselves as conservative than liberal, but they are more liberal when you look at particular issues such as health insurance and whether the rich pay too little in taxes. When you look at a large basket of issues, however, you find the voters to be between the two parties, as is indicated in our graphs above.

Voters and nonvoters

Finally, we should distinguish between political positions of voters and of Americans in general. As Nagler and Leighley have discussed, nonvoters differ systematically from voters:

The ideological distribution of voters and non-voters in 2004 is fairly similar to that in 1972: moderates are most under-represented, while conservatives are over-represented. Importantly, the magnitude of these differences increases between 1972 and 2004. . . . these differences on class-based issues are enduring and increasing.

For the question, What should President Obama (or McCain) do?, the opinions of nonvoters aren’t so relevant. But for statements about America, compared to other countries with higher voter turnout, it’s worth keeping these differences in mind.

In conclusion

Both Meacham and Alter have useful perspectives on recent American political history, and the data we’ve looked at don’t directly address the “center-right” vs. “center-left” controversy: these terms only make sense when compared to some contemporary standard. But the evidence, both from elections and from polls, supports the commonsensical idea that the two major parties are far enough apart that, at least in the short term, voters can move policy as far as they want to the left or to the right by consistently voting for Democrats or Republicans. Either party, when elected, has to balance its policy goals with its desire not to move too far away from the center.

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.

The New York Times ran a fascinating piece on ideology and theater. Turns out that, unlike literature where a couple of big names are right-leaning, (secular) theater is almost exclusively blue. David Mamet is one of the few exceptions. The article points to Saul Bellow, Mark Helprin, and V.S. Naipul as the literary rightists. I’ve only read the latter’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and it wasn’t particularly conservative.

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.

From my American Journal of Sociology paper with Delia:

Party identification and self-defined liberalism/conservatism are increasingly correlated with positions on specific issues. The increases in correlations have been highest for moral issues. Issue positions have also become increasingly correlated with each other–but the increases have been smaller than the increased correlations with party ID and liberal/conservative ideology. Correlations between pairs of issues have increased by about 2% per decade, on average, while correlations of issues with party or ideology have increased by about 5% per decade (again, on average). The data come from the National Election Study.

Our story: voters are sorting themselves into parties and ideologies based on their issue attitudes; having done this sorting, they are aligning themselves slightly with their new allies.