On Nov 18, 2006, at 5:54 PM, jdiebremse wrote:
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dave Land <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Folks,
Offered without much study, because it is 4AM and I'm only awake
because something at work is going rather badly, but while waiting
for something to deploy, I found this:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/spectrum.xpd
Which, like the post last week, purports to show how liberal
or conservative are various members of Congress.
This one still shows a great deal of division, but more overlap
in the middle, especially by Republicans in the Senate, Almost
no Democrats are shown to be much right of center, while a
handful of Republicans are shown in the middle of "Democratic"
territory.
Interesting. He links to Poole as someone who "know[s] a lot more
about this than [he does]".
I'm still shocked that people really had such a hard time believing
that
partisan divisions might actually mean something... particular in the
current day and age.....
Oh, I definitely believe that they mean something, and I think that
the authors of the two studies we've discussed recently believe so, too.
What I find somewhat _incredible_ (and I chose that word for its actual
meaning, not casually) is that of 100 members of the Senate in the first
study, there was an overlap of exactly one member. Hence, I called out
the larger degree of overlap in the second study.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about how it is that in a country of
some 300 million, the division is so nearly perfectly 50-50, and the
only real conclusion I've come to is that the way TV presents "both"
sides of an issue, no matter how complex has convinced us that there are
only and exactly two sides to every issue.
Dave
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