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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (59190)	4/14/2008 3:30:24 PM
From: slacker711	Respond to of 542936

If you are going to quote the National Journal ratings, you might wish to take a look at how they made the rankings. I'm told it's quite odd. Forget the methodology, how about more than one data point? I took a look on their website and their previous rankings are only for subscribers. I could only find the '06 rankings and they listed him as the 10th most liberal Senator. As for Obama being "far left" of Clinton, it ain't so. They are both reasonably well situated in the moderate wing of the Dem party. He's a bit left of her because he refuses to affiliate with the DLC. But there are specific policy issues on which folk who think the left/right distinction makes sense, would place her to his left. Health insurance would certainly be one. I just don't find these particular distinctions very helpful (though I do use them, on occasion). We don't really have a serious left in this country, not, at least, in the way there is a left in Europe. You obviously answered my previous question. I was just curious about your views.... I will say this though, I really dont think that using Europe as a framework helps the debate much. There is no absolute scale and US politics is the obvious prism when anybody is labeled as "conservative" or "liberal". I dont really think it would make sense to do it otherwise. Slacker

To: JohnM who wrote (59190)	4/14/2008 3:48:08 PM
From: Bridge Player	Respond to of 542936

If you are going to quote the National Journal ratings, you might wish to take a look at how they made the rankings. I'm told it's quite odd. Since you mentioned it......... ======================================================= By National Journal staff, © National Journal Group Inc. Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008 A panel of National Journal editors and reporters initially compiled a list of 216 key congressional roll-call votes for 2007 -- 107 votes for the Senate and 109 for the House -- and classified them as relating to economic, social, or foreign policy. Polidata, a nonpartisan political data-analysis firm, downloaded lists from the House and Senate websites of how all the members voted on the key votes. Those lists were then sent to the Brookings Institution, where the Information Technology Services division performed the data processing and statistical analysis. The ratings system was first devised in 1981 under the direction of William Schneider, a political analyst and commentator, and a contributing editor to National Journal. The votes in each issue area were subjected to a principal-components analysis, a statistical procedure designed to determine the degree to which each vote resembled other votes in the same category (the same members tending to vote together). Ten of the 216 votes (eight in the Senate and two in the House) were dropped from the analysis because they were statistically unrelated to others in the same issue area. These typically were votes that reflected regional and special-interest concerns, rather than general ideology. The analysis also revealed which yea votes correlated with which nay votes within each issue area (members voting yea on certain issues tended to vote nay on others). The yea and nay positions on each roll call were then identified as conservative or liberal. Each roll-call vote was assigned a weight from 1 (lowest) to 3 (highest), based on the degree to which it correlated with other votes in the same issue area. A higher weight means that a vote was more strongly correlated with other votes and was therefore a better test of economic, social, or foreign-policy ideology. The votes in each issue area were combined in an index (liberal or conservative votes as a percentage of total votes cast, with each vote weighted 1, 2, or 3). Absences and abstentions were not counted; instead, the percentage base was adjusted to compensate for missed roll calls. A member who missed more than half of the votes in any issue category was scored as "missing" in that category (shown as an asterisk [*] in the vote-rating tables). Members were then ranked from the most liberal to the most conservative in each issue area. These rankings were used to assign liberal and conservative percentile ratings to all members of Congress. The liberal percentile score means that the member voted more liberal than that percentage of his or her colleagues in that issue area in 2007. The conservative figure means that the member voted more conservative than that percentage of his or her colleagues. For example, a House member in the 30th percentile of liberals and the 60th percentile of conservatives on economic issues voted more liberal than 30 percent of the House and more conservative than 60 percent of the House on those issues, and was tied with the remaining 10 percent. The scores do not mean that the member voted liberal 30 percent of the time and voted conservative 60 percent of the time. Percentile scores can range from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100. Some members, however, voted either consistently liberal or consistently conservative on every roll call. As a result, there are ties at both the liberal and the conservative ends of each scale. For that reason, the maximum percentiles are usually less than 100. Members also receive a composite liberal score and a composite conservative score, each of which is an average of their six issue-based scores. Members who missed more than half of the votes in any of the three issue categories do not receive a composite score.