Rain in Death Valley, Party Voting in California, Congress and Tiddlywinks

by Karl Kurtz

It's more likely to rain in Death Valley on any given day than it is for a California legislator to vote in opposition to the majority of his or her party on any given bill....

That's the clever lead on a Sacramento Bee story on the extent of party-line voting by members of the California Legislature.  The story analyzes nearly 200,000 (!) individual votes by senators and Assembly members in committee and on the floor to date in the 2009 legislative session, concluding that majority party Democrats voted against the majority of their own party only 1 percent of the time and minority Republicans about 4 percent.  The story has lots of cool graphics and interactive maps.

For the non-California reader, the most interesting thing was this quote:

"California is by far the most polarized state legislature" in the nation, said professor Boris Shor, with the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies, who recently published a study on the ideological composition of legislatures. "California makes the U.S. Congress look like tiddlywinks."

I searched for Shor's study and found an unpublished paper "All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space."  Shor's conclusion about California is based not on roll call votes but "on 10 years (1996-2006) of the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT) administered by Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan organization that disseminates information on campaigning [state legislators and members of Congress] to the public at large."

On p. 17 of Shor's paper are two charts that show the ideological polarization of all 50 state legislatures.  On his scale the 5 most polarized legislatures in the United States are California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Hawaii.  The 5 with the least ideological division between the parties are Idaho, Alaska, Utah, South Dakota and South Carolina. 

The data appear to show that the more liberal states in the country have wide differences between the political parties in the legislature, while the more conservative ones have relatively small differences between Republicans and Democrats.  This does not seem surprising to a more casual observer of state legislative politics, but the data and detail in Shor's paper are interesting and reveal a few surprises (e.g., why are those Ohio Democrats relatively right of their national party scores and what about those apparently leftward leaning--relatively--Wyoming Republicans?) 

Warning: the paper is not for those who are statistically challenged or methodologically faint of heart.

Comments

[Boris S.]

Karl, thanks for looking up my work.

The SacBee interview followed up my blog post that's been getting a little bit of attention in the blogosphere and the mainstream press. It can be found here:

http://bit.ly/scozzafava

That blog post is based on a paper that's related, but far less preliminary, than the paper Karl has linked to. That paper is here:

http://bit.ly/101chambers