Why bipartisanship can't work right now: the other axis

by: Darcy Burner

Tue Sep 22, 2009 at 18:56

When we talk about the political spectrum, we usually talk about it as though it is a line with a left and a right, like this:
But that's inadequate to describe a lot of the political dynamics that are playing out. There's another axis perpendicular to the first that's become very important recently, which I have been referring to in conversations as the cause-effect axis:
Bipartisanship at the federal level is impossible in any meaningful way right now because there are almost no elected Republicans in the upper right quadrant.

(More below the fold.)

The Political Broadcast Spectrum

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Aug 08, 2009 at 11:30

Scaling Michelle Malkin

When I saw that Michelle Malkin will be on the Stephanopoulos panel this week, my first thought was that nobody as far to the left as she is to the right would ever appear on such a panel. But then I started to wonder (a) what I mean by that (b) if it's true.

I don't want to be like Bill O'Reilly, who considers anyone he disagrees with a "far-left" activist. So we need some objective metric. The most natural would seem to be voter opinion: what fraction of the American public is to Malkin's right? Would somebody with an equally small number of people to his or her left get on a Sunday morning panel?

Krugman went on to specify even more stringently:

The trouble, of course, is how to measure that. In principle, it shouldn't be hard. What I'd like to have is a Guttman scale of positions on political matters, such that almost everyone who gave the "liberal" answer to question 7 also gave liberal answers to questions 1-6, while almost everyone who gave the conservative answer to question 7 also gave conservative answers to questions 8-13.

In fact, a Guttman scale is pretty much impossible, even if you're going to define ideology so narrowly that it misses much of what you want to capture.  There are multiple reasons why this can't be done.  First off, a lot of people have only the foggiest notion of ideology, and their policy positions are a complete mish-mash.  (Demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare is just the tip of a very large iceberg.) Second, there really is a significant diversion between economic liberalism in a New Deal sense and social liberalism, in a feminist, pro-gay, pro-diversity sense.  Third, even within more narrow issue scales people often don't line up in Guttman scale order.

In short, the concept of "ideology" in American politics is inherently too fuzzy to fulfill Krugman's desire for a Guttman scale.  But that hardly means we can't do better than Bill O'Reilly.  We just have to accept the fact that we're measuring something messy.  But we can still make some headway.  A couple of posts at The Monkey Cage tried to respond to Krugman, and I'd like to use one of them as a good jumping-off point for talking about some of the complexities involved.

John Sides came up with the following chart as a "lazy bloggers" solution:

It uses three questions from 2008 American National Election Study, which are economically ideological in nature.  Unfortunately, there's a very old finding of public opinion research that tells us this picture is incomplete....  (More charts on the flip.)