(again via Making Light)
A chap in the US named Ben Hyde runs a blog where stats and politics get combined. This post here is absolutely fascinating.
In it, Hyde charts all the US Senators on a graph, based entirely on where they generally sit on social issues and where they sit on economic issues. It’s just like the political compass.
Then, for each senate vote, a line is drawn to separate the senators who voted yea from those who voted nay. Usually it isn’t possible to separate the two sides entirely with a line, but most of the time very few senators end up stuck on the wrong side. This shows it’s on to something interesting.
(The charts on his site show the line for lots of senate votes- it’s a half-meg changing chart so may take a moment to load. The one on the left shows all the senators that fit the line division, the one on the right-hand side shows all the senators that don’t – there are hardly any senators on the right-hand chart.)
Furthermore, you can tell how voting split from the angle of the line. If it’s up-down, then the split was based on economic issues; if it’s left-right, the split is based on social issues.
Then it gets very very interesting indeed. Hyde says:
The model is extremely accurate; around 95% these days. Amazingly you don
“(One problem with the model is it doesn’t say how the senators were assigned their positions. That info is probably in the site somewhere, but I haven’t seen it yet.)”
You have to track through a couple of links. Basically, the analysts made a theory that the senators could be ordered in a particular sequence and wrote a heuristic that would find the order that fit with the least error. One supercomputer later they came up with a model that had pretty good accuracy on one dimension. Then they got more complicated and introduced a second dimension, based on their knowledge of politics in the period under study.
There’s a reasonably straightforward explanation of both projects here: http://voteview.com/nominate/nominate.htm
I tested my self on the political compass and came out in a similar position to Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela.
Interesting.
I think that the fact that people who might unambigiously be labeled “good” (or at least, people might be uncomfortable labeling “evil”) are in the botom-left of the political compass. Does this represent a bias in the compass, or our culture? (Or maybe I’m naive to think that the Dalai Lama is a “good” (not perfect, but good) person to most people.)
I don’t think it’s a bias, Svend – I think that the general cross-cultural understanding of ‘good’ does sit in that corner of the compass. That’s what it *means*.
I think, however, that people elsewhere in the compass don’t think of themselves as ‘evil’ in relation to ‘good’, but rather ‘realistic’ as opposed to ‘unrealistic’.
c.f. also Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” – this was shocking and powerful precisely because it was an inversion of culture.
Michael Douglas has said he still gets young stock brokers coming up to him saying “When you said ‘Greed is good, greed works’, it changed my life! Now it’s my mantra!”
His response is along the lines of “Did you actually notice where my character ended up?”
I may be bottom-left, but I dislike the “libertarian” label.
Not sure you could map our parliament in a similar way, as almost all votes are on simple party lines here. As I understand it (and I don’t really claim to) USA representatives often feel more loyalty to their constituency than their party, and have more freedom to vote accordingly. Which does make their stance more transparent, rather than hidden within the caucus system.
It would be very difficult to do this for New Zealand, because as Ben points out, almost every vote is a party-line vote. Those that aren’t are on social issues parties are too chicken to take a stance (alternatively, feel they should constrain their members’ consciences) on. You never AFAIK see conscience votes on economic issues.
“You never AFAIK see conscience votes on economic issues.”
Ah, but that’s the trick – the analysis on the senate voting showed that often issues which were entirely social with no economic component were still decided on an economic basis.
The problem is the number of conscience votes that go through the house – presumably far too small to say anything meaningful.
Ah well. I shall still think about it wistfully.
Morgue: have a look here – its just over 40 since 1999 (though a large amount of that is the subsidiary bills that the Relationships Act was split into).
While there’s a general left/right split, with Labour MPs more likely to vote for socially progressive legislation,a nd nats against, its not absolute; there’s a small but consistent group of Labour MPs who are generally regressive (one down, now that Field is effectively out ofthe picture), and a slightly larger but still consistent group of Nats who are liberal. The minor parties fall pretty much where you’d expect them to.
OTOH, there are issues such as sunday / easter trading and death with dignity where its all over the show, and the usual progressive / regressive split breaks down. I guess these really are “conscience” issues…
Bugger, it ate the link. I meant here:
http://commonz.wotfun.com/
cheers for that link, idiot, verra interest.