July 24, 2008
The ideology of voters, congressmembers, and senators
Andrew Gelman has a post on some of the findings of his forthcoming and apparently very promising book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State:
These plots from John Sides reminded me of some graphs from our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book that display 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.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 06:13 PM | Permalink
Comments
I think this explains it pretty easily: A politician running on a "left" political platform wants to appeal to the average left-half voter. The center of the left-half of the voter distribution is to the left of the center of the entire voter distribution.
You can sort of see that on the graph.
Posted by: - | Jul 24, 2008 7:09:03 PM
Shouldn't the "(liberal)" label be a little further towards the middle? There are plenty of people in that left tail who are socialist, after all.
Posted by: Sagredo | Jul 24, 2008 10:02:44 PM
I've been saying for many a long hungry year that it's not Liberal v. Conservative so much as rich v. poor. Class is much more important than we'd like to admit here in the USofA. But i suppose, since the last time we did have a more transparent discussion on that topic, many people were killed, we have to use code words.
Posted by: missvolare | Jul 25, 2008 9:09:20 AM
Sagredo,
Not in this country -- there unfortunately are pitifully few American socialists.
Missvolare,
Yes, we should discuss class much more fully in this country (and that would probably increase the number of socialists, provided that we came up with a decent concept of socialism, which so far has proven damned difficult to do). But that would require Americans with little or no property to their names to feel more solidarity with each other, instead of scrambling to put "me first" all the time, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
Posted by: JonJ | Jul 25, 2008 10:30:53 AM
it's not Liberal v. Conservative so much as rich v. poor.
I believe if that was what this chart illustrated the House and Senate curves would be skewed far to the right. Our selected leaders are much richer than the average American. It would be an interesting chart to see, but probably one they would prefer you didn't. Owing to their Oligarchical status, are they as sensitive as they need to be about how their...oh, pick one...energy policies will impact the poor with artificially elevated costs (through carbon taxes) for food, heat & transportation? They don't seem to be, rather more along the lines of Mme. Antoinette.
But who was killed and when missvolare?
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 25, 2008 10:31:21 AM
Here's a primer--Class War in America: How Economic and Political Conservatives Are Exploiting Low- and Middle-Income Americans by Charles M. Kelly.
There have been numerous riots and deaths in the storied history of this supposedly "fair" country, not to mention the deplorable "lifestyle"/health of "lower class" people which inevitably leads to early death and curtailed abilities. I do not identify with Socialism, but with Humanism, which leads me to the ineluctable conclusion that we continue to exploit working people to maintain a structure which is inherently unfair.
Posted by: missvolare | Jul 25, 2008 11:45:29 AM
Granted, although Mr. Kelly might have done us all a service by looking up from his agenda long enough to notice that Liberals, also, are guilty of their own flavor of exploitation of the lower and middle classes.
I took from your first comment, however, that there was once a transparent conversation on the issue of rich vs poor that had led to many killings (presumably with the rich killing the poor rather than the French method). You phrased it more as if it was a discreet event (or series of linked events) rather than being merely a consequence of poor people being damaged by their poverty, or occasionally getting the law sicked on them for getting uppity. In this, it is difficult to single out the USA as a particularly notable or even representative example of this globally and historically common reality, although I agree we should strive not to make the list at all.
Posted by: Carlos | Jul 25, 2008 12:48:04 PM
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