Some graphs looking at the voting on the Stupak amendment. This roll call sliced up the Democrats pretty nicely. Thumbnails below link to PDFs. Democrats only in the 1st graph, looking at the relationship between the Ayes and Noes and Obama vote share in the representatives’ respective districts.
And one more look at last night’s vote, this time with each representative’s estimated ideal point (based on the entire 111th House thus far) as the predictor, similar to what I did for the Coburn amendment in the Senate.
Update: and yet another graphical rendering (click on the thumbnail for the PDF).
Here is a quick look at how Democrats split on the House vote on the Affordable Health Care for America Act, as a (logistic) function of Obama vote in their district.
Davis (AL-7) and Kucinch (OH-10) are the big “errors” among the “Noe” votes; Kucinch had been telegraphing his opposition to a too meek reform bill for some time. Davis is the same boat (“is this the best we can do?“).
Marion Berry (AR-1) is the biggest “error” among the “Aye” votes; he voted yes while representing an Arkansas district where McCain got 59% of the vote and Obama just 38% (but, perhaps reflecting much about that part of Arkansas, he was unopposed in the 2008 Congressional elections) and he seems to have long history of being in the forefront of Democratic reform efforts on health care.
Update: a nice take on the Dems voting Noe from the NYTimes.
I did a little work on the Coburn amendment rollcall. The vanilla spatial voting model fits the roll call reasonably well; I use all 341 roll calls cast by the 111th U.S. Senate (at least as of this morning when I ran the analysis) to estimate the ideal points, and then look at the fit to the roll call on the Coburn amendment.
The graph (thumbnail below) summarizes the fit, with the curve tracing out the predicted probabilities as a function of estimated ideal point (these come a simple probit regression of the actual votes on the ideal points). The estimated cutpoint — the point where a legislator is indifferent, on average — is between the ideal points of Voinovich (R OH) and Murkowski (R AK).
The “surprises” (or deviations from “pure” spatial voting) are show on the graph:
Snowe (R ME) and Collins (R ME) are to the left of the cutpoint and voted in accordance with the model prediction.
Bayh is up for re-election in 2010, as is Voinovich; for what it is worth, both are in Midwestern states. The splits in the MO and NE delegations are interesting.
In the spirit of trying to explain “errors” here, I’m wondering if any of our political science colleagues engaged in lobbying (seriously). For instance, did the Vandy people email Lamar Alexander? Did the UT/UH/Rice/Texas A&M people contact Cornyn’s office? And a lot of Federal research money finds it way to North Carolina, too (e.g., SAS, RTI, UNC & Duke, etc); Burr (R-NC) voted against the amendment, with an ideal point a long way to the right of the estimated cutpoint. Of course, it would also be interesting to consider cases where lobbying might have failed (McCaskill?).
Conversations with colleagues I was with yesterday (at the NSF!) had the more sensible take on this, probably to chalk it up to “position-taking”; with such a small amount of money at stake, the vote is largely symbolic (were that it were otherwise). That is, this is the kind of roll call that incumbents will add to their respective tallies in campaign statements to the effects of “I voted against waste and fraud n times…”
The Coburn amendment to cut political science funding from the NSF was defeated yesterday. There were some interesting breaks across party lines on this one: McCaskill (D-MO) voted to kill, but the Republican MO senator voted the other way. A similar pattern in Nebraska. Evan Bayh voted to kill NSF funding of polisci.
Ironically, I am at NSF and can’t do an analysis of the vote from behind the firewall etc (blogging my iPhone right now).
Some slides from a talk I gave at a conference sponsored by the American Political Science Association on “Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators” at the University of California, Berkeley, October 30-31, 2009. The graphic below shows the estimates of country-level democracy for the year 2000 (with marginal 95% credible intervals) that Shawn Treier and I estimated using the Polity IV indicators (a better quality version appears in the slides).
Plus an early attempt at cross-national measurement of regime type (complete with uncertainty bounds), a nice parting gift from our host, Henry Brady.
Terry Durack gets it about right re the current state of Sydney dining and cuisine…
Friday night at LAX. I’m headed back to the Bay Area. Our departure gate was next to the united Sydney flight. It is weird to look over at those faces and immediately see the Australian stock. You know immediately you are looking at a predominantly Australian crowd, but it takes a little while for the cognitive part of the brain to figure out why… Predominantly white, close to zero Latino faces, perhaps a tad ganglier relative to the other people in the terminal, in LA, in the USA.
On taxi I spied 4 QF 747s and an A380 plus two V Australia 777s. That’s a lot of inventory headed to Oz from here.
My brother Tom says the dust storm today on the East coast of Australia reminds him of a Midnight Oils lyric (“cue the emus”):
When the spinifex hit Sydney, it was the last thing we expected
When the desert came to Gladesville, we tried to tame it
And when the emus grazed at Pyrmont, it suddenly dawned on us all
Hah, finally the world was silent and the door was shut
Photo below stolen from the Sydney Morning Herald’s site.
Catching up on the New Yorker now that we’re back in the US. Bruce Western pointed me to a recent David Sedaris take on Australia.
For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It’s Canada in a thong, or that’s the initial impression.
Powered by WordPress
Bad Behavior has blocked 3017 access attempts in the last 7 days.