The divide between political parties is smaller than we think (2020)

Re:The divide between political parties is smaller than we t... by 0xB31B1B on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @06:28PM (#26020641)

The thing is, we have the data, DW nominate is a solid algorithm that can demonstrate rightward/leftward political movement over time. There has been a lot of actual scientific research on this, and over the last 30 years the democratic party has mostly remained the same with a slight left trend, while the republicans have become moved much much further right.

https://voteview.com/congress/senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_(scaling_method)

https://voteview.com/congress/senate

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Re:The divide between political parties is smaller than we t... by edbob on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @09:23PM (#26021836)

> over the last 30 years the democratic party has mostly remained the same with a slight left trend, while the republicans have become moved much much further right.

On visual comparison between the 97th Congress and the 116 Congress, it's obvious that the Democrats have moved pretty far downwards as well as bit leftwards. That is, they became much more liberal on the "Other Votes" dimension while moving much less on the "Economic/Redistributive" axis. Interestingly, this leaves Democrats and Republicans with a pretty similar distribution along that axis.

I don't think this is a good method for comparing different time periods. In the 36th and 37th Congresses, the diehard pro-slavery Democrats versus the abolitionist Republicans, the graphs put the parties in the same relative positions as today and make the parties look less divided than today, even though the Democrats felt like they could no longer co-exist and seceded from the Union. It should also be obvious that the slave-economy Democratic Party was vastly different than the modern-day party, but the graphs don't reflect that.

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Re:The divide between political parties is smaller than we t... by pgcj_poster on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @11:04PM (#26022436)

I'm wondering what the "Other Votes" dimensions is even capturing, as Democrats seem to have been more conservative than Republicans on it up until the 2010s.

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Re:The divide between political parties is smaller than we t... by brnt on Thursday February 04, 2021 @02:33AM (#26023419)

That always surprises me, especially for a crowd that prides itself on data driven approaches such as this one.

Use a source like the extremely well-researched Dark Money and it'll be evident that the GOP fundamentally isn't representative of the people, it doesn't even pretend to be, and if you listen in the right forums, their leaders don't even claim that. Yet, people, trained in data driven thinking or not, are boxed in into thinking with their guts, how they 'identify', and are taken for a run.

Maybe the strategy of making you question the very possibility of even knowing truths about political actors is working as well as the instigators of such theories think they would.

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