Geeky politics

Party unity in the US Senate, 2009

Partisan differences and the 'public option'

I thought it would be interesting to look at historical patterns in partisan attitudes to government-sponsored health insurance. I looked at responses to the American National Election Survey question on self-placement on a seven-point scale, where a 'one' indicates the respondent favors an entirely government-run health insurance system, while a seven indicates the respondent supports only private health insurance.

What I found is that Americans, regardless of party identification, generally favor a mixture of both private and government health insurance. To be sure, Republicans are more favorable of private plans and Democrats more in favor of a government plan (with Independents somewhere in the middle), but there is surprisingly not a great deal of difference between the parties.

The first of the two graphs shows the mean value for members of each party, along with 'Independents' (N.B., 'leaners' were coded as partisans) on the seven-point ANES scale. What we see is a strong degree of consistency in attitude, especially among Democrats and Independents. Starting in the early 1990s Republicans became less favorable to the so-called 'public option', although this trend seems to have stopped to a large degree.

The second graph shows the differences in mean position for each of the three groups. For example, the red line shows the mean difference in opinion between Republicans and Democrats. Two things are immediately notable:

The differences in the average position between Democrats and Republicans has grown larger over time and continues to do so. The average difference between Democrats and Republicans during the 1970s was roughly one point on the ANES scale. In the 30 years between 1978 and 2008 it doubled. Clearly the divide between partisans, not party elites, has increased and in today's partisan environment, will probably continue to increase. This divide might help explain the seemingly great animosity between sided on the health care reform issue.
The difference between Democrats and Independents was much greater in 2008 than in 1992. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on health care reform, and on some sort of government-provided health care ('socialized medicine', if you will) as important parts of the platform. For each it was the dominant focus of their freshman year legislative agenda. Yet Obama was successful while Clinton was not. Why? One answer might be that the Democrats have larger majorities now than they had in 1992. Another reason might be that Democrats are now much more ideologically similar than they were in 1992, largely caused by the 1994 Congressional election all but decimating the Democratic Southern Caucus.

I'll continue to look at changing patterns in support for government-sponsored health care.

Ohio Issue 3, 2009

I'm trying to make some sense of the votes for and against Issue 3, a constitutional amendment allowing for a single corporation to hold a monopoly on casinos in the state, and granting them the right to construct up to three total in four designated counties around the state. So far I'm not having a lot of luck. I don't have individual-level data to look at, yet, if ever, so I'm stuck with county-level data. This constrains interpretation to a great degree. Some very general things are notable:

Central Ohio voters were more likely than not opposed to the issue. Voters in Delaware and Franklin counties voted against the measure by roughly a 3-2 margin. Those in surrounding counties such as Pickaway, Madison, and Licking also opposed the amendment, albeit by a narrower margin.
Voters in and near cities in the Northeast and Southwest, i.e. Cleveland, Cincinnati, and environs, supported the measure.

Harkin says he has the votes

Harkin says he has the votes to pass public option bill in the Senate - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room

Shared via AddThis

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/60739-public-option-fails-in-senate-committee

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/60739-public-option-fails-in-senate-committee

Shared via AddThis

How low can Obama's approval rating get and he still win re-election?

As long as he's at about 45% or above he should be OK.

Generic congressional ballot

Things are not looking good for the Democrats right now.

Ideology and Supreme Court confirmation votes

100 day job grades

In a poll conducted from April 23-26, 2009 by the Opinion Research Corporation (on behalf of CNN), respondents were asked a series of questions, many of which focused on grading the performance of President Obama and the 111th Congress, 100 days in. Unsurprisingly, there was a strong relationship between how a respondent graded Obama and how they graded the Democratic congressional delegation. Oddly, a not very strong relationship existed between how Obama and the Republican delegation were graded:

(for details on how this plot was created, see here.)

Gender and non-partisanship

Women are far more likely to be partisans than men. This surprises me, and I can't come up with a good, theoretically sound reason for it. It is well established that women lean disproportionally towards the Democratic Party and men towards the Republican Party, but it also seems as if women lean towards partisanship in general, at least when compared to men. Think of it this way - women are just as likely to be Republicans as men are, but they are far more likely to be Democrats than men. And this pattern is consistent regardless of age or income.

Figure 1. Probability of non-partisanship among men and women, by age group, 2006.

Source: Social Capital Community Survey, 2006

Figure 2. Probability of non-partisanship among men and women, by age group, 2006.

Source: Social Capital Community Survey, 2006

Gallup partisanship trends, 2004-present

Gallup regularly asks poll respondents their party identification. The graph above shows the trend in party id since, roughly, the beginning of 2004. There is a general trend away from the Republican party, but not necessarily to the Democrats. It's also interesting to note that the anti-GOP trend has stopped, and possibly reversed, since the November 2008 election.

The pale dots reflect specific poll results, the wiggly solid lines represent LOWESS-smoothed trends, and the dotted lines represent linear trend estimates based on bivariate OLS regression.

Who votes for green parties?

The educated middle-class left, it appears, at least in the European context. In looking at predilection towards voting for green parties rather than social democratic parties as part of a larger research project, I ran some quick and dirty logistic regressions, using data from the first (2002) wave of the European Social Survey. I'm looking at Europe (or at least the countries represented in the survey) as a whole, and also some individual countries. For the present time I am restricting my analysis to those respondents I have coded as "soft left", i.e., those who responded with a "3" or "4" on an 11-point (0-10) left-right scale. It is these voters whom I consider to be the most fertile "hunting ground", in a Downsian party space, for both social democratic and green parties. Table 1, below, shows that the 'typical' green or social democratic voter is just slightly left of a four on the 0-10 self-placement scale.

Table 1. Summary data for placement on a left-right scale of green and social democratic voters.

Next I will look at some proxies for middle-class status and their relationship with a predilection for voting either green or social democratic. Since my hypothesis is not only that persons who are currently middle class are, ideology being held constant, more likely to vote green than social democratic, but also (and this is actually the important past), those who have middle-class backgrounds, i.e., their parents were middle class as well, form the base of ecological party support. Therefore, two proxies for continued middle-class status are introduced, father’s level of education and father’s employment status – professional, middle class, working class.

1. Level of education

First, looking at the respondent's (voter's) level of education, there is in several countries in the survey a marked relationship in the likelihood to support either a green or social democratic party, based on level of education. This relationship is particularly evident in the case of Austria:

Figure 1. The relationship between education and the probability of voting either green (Grüne) or social democratic (SPÖ) in Austria.

The above graph shows Austria to be an almost perfect illustration of the effect of education on voting behavior among "soft left" respondents. the probability lines are almost symmetrical in their negative relationship - the less educated you are, the more likely you will vote for the SPÖ; the better educated, the greater likelihood you will vote Grüne, with the point at which the likelihood is the same being at roughly 15 years of education.

Figure 2. The relationship between education and the probability of voting either green (Vihreä liitto) or social democratic (Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue) in Finland.

Here we see a situation similar to the one in Austria, where "soft-left" voters likelihood to vote green can be seen as a function of education more than anything else, especially as we see education level as a proxy for social class (probably something we can get away with more readily in Europe than in the United States.)

Figure 3. The relationship between education and the probability of voting either green (Grüne) or social democratic (SPÖ) in Sweden.

"Battleground" states

Class "voting" in Ohio

The pattern seems clear.

'Spreading the wealth'

How do Americans really feel about 'spreading the wealth', as Senator Obama so bluntly phrased it last week? Characteristically, Americans are pretty middle-of-the-road when it comes to government redistribution of wealth - we think a little is fine, but not too much, thank you very much. And, also not surprising, your party affiliation says a lot about how you feel about redistributive policies, with Democrats being the most open to it, Republicans the most hostile, and Independents somewhere in the middle.

The graph below shows the average response to the General Social Surveys question, "SHOULD GOVT REDUCE INCOME DIFFERENCES?"

It's interesting to note that each group is roughly in the same place now as it was 20 years ago; with minor fluctuations along the way. Another thing to note is a sharp shift toward the right (or up, in looking at this graph) in the early '90s, coinciding with the major shift in Congressional alignment in the 1994 midterms.

Are these attitudes dependent on external conditions, like high unemployment? In most cases, no. In particular, neither Democrats nor Republicans seem swayed in their beliefs by external conditions. In one case, however, there is evidence of economic conditions affecting attitudes towards redistributive policies. Independents, it seems, respond to economic growth through increased opposition (or decreased support, if you will) for redistributive policies.

So, true to their nature, independents are either truly independent of rigid ideology, or merely blow with the wind, depending on your view of partisanship.

Maybe parties don't matter?

Larry Bartels writes:

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply-and simple-mindedly-rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.

Presidential vote and House seats, by state

Something I did for my own curiosity.

The relationship between Republican presidential vote and the % of a state's House delegation being Republican:

More "swooning" over Sarah...

Mike Murphy, writing for Time's website, doesn't like her either:

What I don’t like is the effect I think Palin will ultimately have on the ticket. With all her charm, she is still a pick aimed squarely at the Republican base. In a high turnout Presidential year, I am not worried about turning out the base. I’m worried about everybody else we need to win and I fear that among those voters, Sarah Palin will be a dud.
I know, I know, she’s a “hockey mom” and through the magic of identity politics she is going to make female voters swarm across party lines in numbers that Gerry Ferraro never dreamed of since this identity politics hokum is only a good idea that is certain to work when, um, we Republicans try to do it.

More here

The idiocy of the Palin pick

Froma Harron on how Sarah Palin is a big turnoff for independents:

Until now, one could counter the Democrats' argument that a McCain presidency would amount to a third term for Bush. After all, McCain is a deficit hawk. He cares about the environment. Many pro-choice voters were willing to overlook McCain's generally anti-abortion stance on the belief that he didn't really care about the issue. And the widespread concern regarding McCain's age could have been assuaged by the choice of a competent vice president.

Then who does McCain pick for VP? A 44-year-old who parades her dysfunctional family as a poster-child for conservative values. Who has virtually no foreign policy experience. Who as mayor of an Alaskan town of 6,700 hired lobbyists to reel in $27 million in federal pork. That's $4,030 of the U.S. taxpayers' money per resident. We thought McCain wanted to close down the trough.