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DW-Nominate scores (4.00 / 2)

are still kind of a mystery to me, seeing how non-transparent they are, but they do go beyond 1.000 (and may not even be finite, since they seem to measure how much a person's record differs from all other members of their body in that particular session); Ron Paul, whose voting record is very much unlike that of anyone else's, is somewhere around a 1.400.

My other thought is that Gillibrand's DW-Nominate score for her House tenure isn't as useful a metric as her current Senate record, since, as Maloney points out, Gillibrand has "evolved." Unfortunately, there's no DW-Nom scores this early in the session, but Progressive Punch scores have been calculated, and Gillibrand is at 97.81 for the 111th Congress, which slots her in at #16. The four Senators closest to her on PP are Whitehouse (98.70), Harkin (98.12), Levin (97.52), and Leahy (97.48), so by treating these guys as a cohort and averaging out their DW-Nom scores from the 110th (- 0.531, - 0.569, - 0.499, and - 0.490, respectively), Gillibrand seems to be operating around - 0.522 this session. (Although I should add "for now" to that last sentence, as she's on her best behavior right now.)

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by: Crisitunity @ Wed Jul 01, 2009 at 15:50:00 PM CDT

I wouldn't call DW-NOMINATE non-transparent (0.00 / 0)

Although reading an explanation of it, I would say that it is much too complex to be understood by the average poster here.

One possible explanation for someone like Gillibrand changing in DW-NOMINATE score upon moving to the Senate is that members of the House feel much more electoral pressure to bring their votes in line with the views of their district since they are up for election every two years, but Senators feel less pressure due to longer terms, so they are more likely to vote their conscience.  Some Senators will move leftward as a result and some might move rightward.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Wed Jul 01, 2009 at 17:20:42 PM CDT

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