A mystery: Parties collapsing in the Vermont Senate
Published by Skeptikos on Aug 15, 2013
Party discipline is verging on collapse in the Vermont Senate, according to a new analysis of rollcall votes from the state.
Like New Hampshire, I used W-NOMINATE and DW-NOMINATE, computer programs developed by political scientists, to analyze state rollcall votes and place legislators along the left/right spectrum.
Here is a graph of the results for the Vermont Senate, where up is farther left and down is farther right. (I added violin plots on top of the boxplots, in order to show the distribution of senators.) You can see the blue Democrats moving toward – and overlapping with – the red Republicans.
(Click to enlarge.)
In all other senates I have seen so far, including the US Senate, parties are well-defined and cohesive. For example, here are the state senates in New Hampshire and Maine:
In fact, the Vermont results are so bizarre that I assumed I must have made a mistake. But after a lot of double-checking, and after verifying the results with some Vermonter friends, it appears to be correct.
Unlike the Vermont Senate, the Vermont House of Representatives shows no signs of deviancy. The parties in that house have become slowly more polarized, just like those of New Hampshire and Maine.
Democratic activists and officials are clearly farther to the left than their state senate candidates. After all, these are the same people who have been pushing Vermont state representatives to the left. But somehow, these activists have lost control of their candidates in the senate– and only in the senate.
I don't know how to explain this. For now, it's a mystery.
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7-31-2014 12:33am
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