Comments on: The Thin Blue Line That Stays Strangely Horizontal

By: AUroch

AUroch — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 05:48:09 +0000

>is that a thing that happens in the US?

Only once or twice a decade, at the national level, and they usually lose their next election.

By: The Communists Won | Free Northerner

The Communists Won | Free Northerner — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 05:01:57 +0000

[…] for a while and was created to prove empirical claim #1 of neoreaction from Anissimov. Scott at Slate Star Codex used a computer program to analyze the results, but the graph is prima facie ludicrous. It is […]

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:45:03 +0000

It’s funny that they say you should only use their model with two parties, but then they say that you should think of the Southern Democrats as a third party. If the concern is separating parties, two dimensions are enough to separate three parties.

But they don’t say two parties, but the two-party system. I’m not sure why the two-party system specifically matters, but the party system has a huge effect. Parties exist to negotiate and compromise on an ideology. Maybe the ideology of a party is the average of those of its members, but the party greatly decreases the variance. People subordinate their views to the party; that is what they contribute to the party. Poole quietly admits this when he says that people who switch parties will jump in ideology space, and thus he counts them as two people. So of course this method will draw emphasis to the axis between the two parties. That one axis explains most of the variance is an artifact of having two strong parties. But it’s still probably a good proxy for the left-right axis. I don’t have any conclusions to draw from this comment, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:26:29 +0000

Vaniver said that they allow people to move through ideology space at constant speed. After I read that, I thought I saw it in the paper, but now I can’t find it.

Maybe what he means by that sentence is that one model makes the assumption and he compares it to another model, but I can’t tell what that other model is.

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By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 08:46:30 +0000

I’m still confused. I don’t understand the paper arguing that legislators’ views change little over time. It seems to assume much of the conclusion. At the top of part 2 (part 1 being the introduction) we get this:

“I make the assumption that all members of Congress who do not change their party affiliation including those who change from the House to the Senate have fixed ideological positions throughout their careers.”

What.

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By: Tom Hunt

Tom Hunt — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 04:18:58 +0000

One might also suggest that the positions of politicians are measured in, essentially, the derivative of the “societal position” value that seems to have drifted significantly leftward over the past century. Thus, shifts in legislators’ positions, or even party averages, don’t significantly change the calculus so long as the overall average (which is a first-differential value) remains positive. You’ll notice that, in mainstream political discourse, Republicans may staunchly resist the passage of liberal bills which are newly introduced, but not nearly as much effort goes into attempting to undo past changes. They may quite strongly resist passing new gun control laws, but no one is seriously proposing an effort to repeal NFA ’34 or GCA ’68. They may oppose new entitlements, but no one serious is trying to actually do away with Social Security. And so on.

The reason why it’s liberal causes, rather than conservative ones, which display this ratchet effect is a different one, and probably deeply tied in with neo-reactionary philosophy somehow.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 21:32:28 +0000

Yes, this is the kind of question that this kind of data could answer. Poole claims that this is what happens. But Scott doesn’t believe even that claim.

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By: rrb

rrb — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:31:47 +0000

I think this could be it. Is it checkable? I hope someone checks it somehow.

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By: Eric Rall

Eric Rall — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:07:08 +0000

One possibility is that what’s largely static in a politician over the course of his career isn’t necessarily specific policy positions, but rather his temperment and factional affiliation, which combine to produce a comfort zone relative to the overton window. For example, Reagan as a political activist in the 1960s strongly opposed Medicare and Medicaid, but as President in the 1980s made no major effort to arrange their repeal — the overton window had shifted, and Reagan’s policy goals had shifted with it. He was still aligned with the conservative wing of the Republican party, and he still favored policies that were about 3/4 of the way towards the right edge of the overton window (number guestimated), but the specific policy mix had changed with the times.

Under this hypothesis, the shift in the DW-NOMINATE graph represents changing factional composition within each congressional party caucus. When one faction turns out another as the dominant force in a party’s congressional caucus, that would get captured very well by the DW-NOMINATE methodology. But if each faction’s positions shift together because of exterior factors (shifts in the overton window), then that would get missed.

In addition to the anecdotal evidence offered by other commentors, I’d also like to offer the trajectory of government spending as a % of GDP as evidence of a divergence between policy outcomes and DW-NOMINATE scores: (graph)

The immediate appears to have an axe to grind, but he cites some good neutral sources for his data, and I don’t see obvious problems with how he composed the graph.

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By: Damien

Damien — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:13:00 +0000

Well, Wilson didn’t invent segregation, but he did bring it to the federal government and military.

Ah, but Mary said “It was the progressives who swept to power and gave us segregation”. Yes, that’s ahistorical BS.

As for “progressives”, I liked the features Scott gave Raikoth’s putative conlang, starting with “no unquantified plurals”. So we need something like ‘all’, ‘most’, ‘some’ etc. in front of progressives. Along with “what is my confidence level” and “what is my evidentiary basis”.

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