When you get paid to beg at what was once a great magazine it somehow seems different.

Then, all I have to do is fold up the tesseract, place it in my pocket, and the Libertarian will vanish into the aether. Problem solved.

The result is that, while Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are probably more liberal in their personal views than quite a few Democrats, and are allowed to break ranks on second-order issues that will play well in Maine, they stick to the party line when it matters.

Megan has a history. It wasn’t the case that some blogger asked a question, with a possible underlying assertion.

And God forbid she should do some actual work to find out.

Just what our discourse was crying out for: a libertarian Jonah Goldberg.”

Don’t be a putz. All she did was ask a simple question on her blog, something that folks around here do all the time. It’s not like she asked anyone to do her research for her. Don’t be a putz.

greatzamfir: isn’t there a problem in this analysis as result of the winner-takes-all system in elections?

Well, the analysis is just meant to capture congressional voting records, not the records of individual members. But you may be right that, even if individual voters are spread along two dimensions, the winner-take-all system would compress their representatives onto one dimension. I’d wonder why it compresses one dimension but not both, OTOH. Is this the point of talking about the party system—that it forces local disagreement onto one axis?

John Emerson: Matt’s “in the three-party era from the 30s to the 80s” is quite misleading; except in 1948 and 1968, the Dixiecrats were always Democrats

It’s Poole’s phrase, more or less, but it’s not meant to suggest that there were three de jure parties; rather than there were three de facto parties. Check out the picture of the 95th House on their site; the southern and non-southern Democrats are pretty well separated, although there was some overlap. (They have the program display any Democrat from the Confederacy +Kentucky/Oklahoma as an S rather than a D.)

Barry, what you describe is exactly how I remember it too. But I think Lemuel is right that a real liberal-conservative ranking (which this isn’t exactly supposed to be) might weight some votes more than others. Then you’re into subjective territory, though.

Others have also pointed out that there’s a lot more than the final vote that goes into liberalism and conservatism. There’s amendments and negotiations in Congress, and there’s the rhetorical status you take outside of Congress. Feinstein often seems to be illiberal on the procedural stuff, and Lieberman loves to undercut the liberal position on talk shows. Still, this is interesting at measuring what it does measure.

Plus she has better hair.

From memory, what this sort of analysis showed was that there had been a two-axis system, which was chiefly due to the Dixiecrats (i.e., a hard-right regional faction allied with a generally more liberal party). Once the Dixiecrats died/retired/converted to the Republican party, the two axes collapsed to a single, left-right axis.

In addition, to answer your question about technique, IIRC they only counted votes with some disagreement; e.g., a vote for ‘National Flowers’ week, passing with close to 100%, would not have been counted.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/01/31/volcker-i-endorse-obama/

http://www.vnews.com/02012008/4601389.htm

The Performance-artist community splits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2JoSo17Azk&e
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEmiavw_-sE

Forget axes, we have a crisis of representation.

And hard numbers you shall have. By means of a sophisticated numerical analysis I have determined that the numeric value of Can I haz Liberal Fascism? is 170. And guess what? By the same analysis Hitlery* Clinton has value 170 as well. QED

*Thanks to Barry for pointing out that it is properly “Hitlery” and not “Hillary”. It wasn’t adding up correctly with “Hillary”, which had me thinking that my methodology was flawed and I would need to find another one. He saved me a lot of time.

But I think one problem is that all votes are not created equal. To get a mapping that corresponds to our intuition, you’d have to give greater weight to certain key votes, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious “automatic” way of doing that.

In this case, most of the anomalies (Lieberman, Paul, etc.) come from positions on the war. Foreign policy by its nature sees fewer roll-call votes, so it’s going to get underweighted in this analysis. If you could somehow correct for that, you might see two axes again. Or not—Lieberman and Paul may be sui generis.

More generally, given the winner-take-all system, a lot of what you’re going to see is regional patterns. Whcih, as has been noted, are a lot less strong now that the South has been somewhat civilized.