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…”
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[...] 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 [...]
Pingback by simon jackman's blog » House vote, Health Care, by ideal point — Sunday November 8, 2009 @ 11:50 pm
For what it’s worth, Burt Monroe sent a note to PSU’s government relations office detailing the NSF support that had come to members of our department over the years (which is substantial). Probably wouldn’t have made a difference, though, since even Specter was probably a “no” from the outset.
Comment by C. Zorn — Monday November 9, 2009 @ 7:48 am
And that snowballed into data collection and a CIC-wide (Big 10 + Chicago) effort by the government affairs offices of those universities to the relevant senators.
Given Bayh and Voinovich, it hardly looks like it was effective.
Comment by Burt — Tuesday November 10, 2009 @ 10:23 am
That would be waste, fraud, AND ABUSE.
(I’ll leave it to others to decide which best describes my NSF grants.)
Comment by MSS — Tuesday November 10, 2009 @ 11:33 am
I’m more impressed by Burr (R-NC) and Cornyn (R-TX) voting N than Bayh voting Y. Maybe our Texas colleagues & friends are better lobbyists than CIC?
Comment by jackman — Tuesday November 10, 2009 @ 1:02 pm
I have a reasonably solid theory for why Cornyn voted against the amendment. A member of his staff earned her PhD in political science from Texas A&M, and was herself at one time, a faculty member at a large research university. She lobbied him.
How do I know this? I went to grad school with her.
Comment by Chris Diaz — Friday November 20, 2009 @ 1:04 pm