The Supercommittee's ideal points

Dan Hopkins suggested looking at the ideal points of members of the new Supercommittee, but he didn't actually plot them out, so I'm giving that a shot. The ideal points come from Simon Jackman's August 2nd estimates.

Just eyeballing it, this looks to be a pretty good balance between the parties. The Democrats' points are all between -1.5 and -0.5, and the Republicans' are all between 0.5 and 1.5, with roughly equal proportions of extremists and moderates. The mean ideal point is -.088. Granted, these ideal points are based on all votes and don't tell us much about how these folks will vote on specific budgetary matters like taxes and social programs, and they don't tell us a thing about negotiating style or tenacity, which could be important. But all in all, this looks like a pretty balanced group who should agree on approximately nothing.

Update: At Darren Schreiber's wise suggestion, I've added the mean ideal point for all members across both chambers (in black) and the respective party means across both chambers. Notably, both parties contain three members to the left of their party mean and three to the right.

Further update: Over at Monkey Cage, Sarah Binder uses Poole and Rosenthal's common space ideal points to draw up the same figure -- these have the virtue of treating all members of Congress as though they were in one big chamber instead of a House and a Senate. And you know what? It looks different!

Notably, the Democrats on the committee look somewhat more centrist than the Republicans do, and Baucus looks like more of a moderate outlier for his party than anyone on the right does. Still, see Binder's post for some important points about where a committee majority might come from.

Even further update: Keith Poole himself writes up a great description of the supercommittee members' ideal points, and generates this awesome chart:

DW-TWEETINATE

I saw some very good papers at MPSA this year, but one that struck me as simultaneously novel, fun, and useful was this one by Duke grad students Aaron King, Francis Orlando, and David Sparks. The authors are interested in figuring out just how much it helps to be ideologically extreme in a primary contest. Unfortunately, we don't have very good measures of candidate ideology, unless the candidates are incumbents (in which case we can approximate their ideology from their roll call voting records). We're mostly left with guessing at candidates' ideological positions from their speeches, donors, endorsees, etc.

King et al decided to look at candidates' Twitter accounts to see who was following them. In theory, the decision to follow or not follow someone on Twitter is in some ways analogous to the decision to vote/not vote for them or to donate/not donate to their campaign. (No, it's not exactly the same -- I follow Sarah Palin but wouldn't give her money or vote for her. But there are certainly similarities.)

The authors use social networks techniques to boil down the literally millions of connections between hundreds of candidates and other political elites to come up with something akin to ideal points for each person. You can see some lists of these ideal points for House and Senate incumbents and their primary opponents here. The authors also scaled some media figures just to see if the results would be credible. (It turns out that Brendan Nyhan is just to the right of Regis & Kelly but just to the left of Toby Keith.) It doesn't appear on the charts, but they scaled me, as well. I have an ideal point of -.077, putting me to Nyhan's left but to the right of Jesse Jackson. (This is believable.)

This is hardly a perfect measure of candidate ideology, as the decision to follow someone is often made for non-ideological reasons. But it works surprisingly well, confirming other studies' findings about ideology and primary elections. Their ideal points almost perfectly predict party for candidates, with the exception of Mickey Kaus. (Frankly, I'd have distrusted their method more if it had gotten Kaus correct.) Within party, the measures are a bit noisy. Interestingly, they have Andrew Romanoff to the right of Michael Bennet, although not by much. It would probably help if they could bootstrap some sort of standard error equivalent in there just so we could tell whether these differences matter.

One other praiseworthy item: the authors distributed a full-color handout during their presentation which contained a QR code, linking to the project's website. Very cool.

Anyway, this is a project worth watching.

It's the maverickosity, stupid

A while I ago I asked why political scientists had such a hard time pin-pointing Sen. Russ Feingold's (D-WI) ideal point.  He seemed to be either the most liberal Democratic senator or one of the most conservative, depending on when you looked at him or how you estimated his score.

Well, Princeton PhD student Ben Lauderdale has helped to explain why this is the case in a new paper (via Monkey Cage).  Lauderdale uses roll call votes to estimate a "maverick score" for members of Congress.  This is roughly a measure of how difficult it is to classify members' votes because their behavior is so unpredictable.  Lo and behold, topping the list is our friend Russ Feingold:

John McCain was quite the maverick back in 2001-02, but today he doesn't even crack the top ten.

This strikes me as a very cool measure and a useful one.  But I suppose the next question is, what exactly are we measuring?  What does one's maverick score indicate?  McCaskill and Bayh are both in moderate-to-conservative leaning states, so maybe they have to be a little mavericky to stay in office.  But Feingold is quite safe in his seat, as is Bernie Sanders, number four on the list.  So electoral safety/vulnerability doesn't look like the cause.  (Lauderdale also notes that Rep. Barney Frank has had a pretty high maverick score throughout his career, with the exception of when he faced potential expulsion in the 101st Congress due to a scandal.  In this case, his career incentive was to be as predictable as possible.)  Is this just a personality type?