Polarization of Congress

Bothsides, right?

1 Like

This chart is also telling.

1 Like

To make things worse we have dipshits on Twitter trying to argue that the opposite is happening.

Data vs meme, which will win out in the mids of the public?

It uses the DW-NOMINATE method, but completely ignores the 2nd dimension. So there’s no credit for recent decidedly liberal shifts in issues like gay marriage, immigration, cannabis legalization, or diversity and inclusion initiatives. That’s the kind of important consideration I’d definitely exclude if I wanted to show that, despite society (voters) and policies/laws becoming more liberal overall, Congress was ackshooally getting more conservative over time.

1 Like

Hmm. Party that wants to over throw free and fair election moved father right. I’m shocked.

1 Like

What about things like guns, taxes, abortion, voting rights, a 6-3 SCOTUS, etc, etc?

Aren’t you happy with a more conservative Congress?

I’m reading about Antebellum USA, and things were pretty bad back then.

I’m going to need you to elaborate on this. I’m not following what you are trying to say.

I’m not particularly familiar with this algorithm.

But a quick perusal on wikipedia claims the first dimension gives 85% accuracy in predicting votes, and the second increases it only to 87%. The second dimension also seems harder to interpret, and to represent different kinds of “residual” correlations over time.

And it’s not clear to me that something like gay marriage is really a conservative/liberal issue, except accidentally. I could imagine a movement for gay marriage, or for cannabis legalization, coming from the libertarian right as much as from the liberal left.

Here you go.

You’re welcome to add the 2nd axis, but I think you’re misunderstanding how it works. If gay marriage, immigration, and cannabis legalization are liberal, as in they are voted for by democrats, then they are part of the 1st axis. Basically, the first axis is everything left/right, and the 2nd axis is everything else. When social and economic issues become correlated, as in now, there is no 2nd axis.

That’s the kind of important consideration I’d definitely exclude if I wanted to show that, despite society (voters) and policies/laws becoming more liberal overall, Congress was ackshooally getting more conservative over time.

Also, I think you (and others here) are jumping to conclusions with this. DW Nominate isn’t supposed to say how left our policies are. Otherwise it would be constantly shifting leftward throughout our whole history.

freudian slip?

I don’t think what’s happening on twitter has a lot to do with what’s happening in Congress.

It may not matter what is happening in congress, but it might influence what people think is happening in congress?

Sure.

I mean, the thing from your Social Network article that you shared that stuck with me is that Twitter is dominated by a small % of radicals. So it throws off any sense of the country as a whole.

Basically, I think, if there was a large contingent of pro-gay Republicans and anti-gay Democrats, then the 2nd axis would add more to the accuracy, and it would show the 4 groups.

What is hard to measure is the indirect influence of these platforms. Twitter might only have 20% of Americans logging in daily. But how much content is retweeted verbally?

Yeah, I don’t know. A lot of tweets are “news”.

I was certain of this before anyone bothered responding to him.

Libertarian and conservative are not synonymous though.

Libertarians favor gay marriage. Conservatives do not. Gay marriage is one that fits pretty neatly on the liberal side of the liberal/conservative spectrum.

It’s just that libertarians are not strictly conservative. In fact they tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. (more fiscally conservative than today’s Republican Party, in fact)