Author Archives: Nolan McCarty

Absolutely Shocking (not)

Illinois politics has never been a font of civic virtue, but (if true) the charges that Governor Rod Blagojevich tried to sell Obama’s Senate seat may represent a new low.

Not to absolve Blagojevich, but much of the problem lays in the anachronistic powers that allow many state governors to fill U.S. Senate vacancies. This may be one of the most unfettered and unaccountable powers vested in most governors. Even pardon and commutation powers are often subject to more procedural openness and limitations. While I’m unaware of an abuse as extraordinary as the one Blogojevich was allegedly perpetrating, recently we’ve seen the appointment of family members and speculation about the appointment of semi-qualified celebrities. (Can someone explain why other than the fact that she can pay for her own reelection Caroline Kennedy is the most qualified New Yorker to serve in the Senate?).

It is not clear why most governors still retain the unilateral power to fill Senate vacancies. The typical argument is that states are at a large disadvantage if they are even temporarily underrepresented in the Senate. But this argument seems very weak. Why is Senate under-representation so much more disadvantageous than House under-representation that special elections are okay for the House but not for the Senate? Second, the delays associated with a special election need not be that great. After all, in the time Blagojevich has taken to create a market for the Illinois Senate seat, the state of Georgia has already successfully completed a runoff election for Senate. Of course, running statewide special elections are expensive. But it is hard to think of anything as expensive as the debasing of the public trust that appears to have happened in Illinois.

The Most Liberal Congress in History?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the “liberal” Congress will push President Obama’s agenda to the left. Clearly, Republicans raised this fear in the Georgia senate run-off and will certainly run against the liberal Congress in the midterms. But others can point to the fact that the Democratic caucus is diverse and many members can hardly be called liberals or progressives. So the big question is how liberal will the next Congress actually be. Using the standard measure of congressional ideology, DW-NOMINATE scores, I can take a whack at this question.

DW-NOMINATE scores, which are based on roll call voting records, run roughly from -1 to 1 where -1 is a very liberal score and 1 is a very conservative score. So to gauge how liberal a given House is, I simply compute the fraction of members with scores that fall beneath certain thresholds. The thresholds I chose were -.3, -.4, and -.5. To give the reader some context, Charlie Rangel and Nancy Pelosi score at approximately -.5, Rahm Emanuel clocked in just below -.4, and Dan Lipinski is just a little more liberal than -.3 (sorry that part of the ideological spectrum is devoid of household names).

The figure reports simple percentages within each of these categories from the beginning of the New Deal to the last congressional term. Obviously I do not have scores for new members and cannot project into next term. There isn’t much need to go back before the New deal, because the pre-New Deal Democratic caucuses were small and overwhelmingly southern.

liberals2.gif

The results are somewhat striking. The 110th House was not only the most liberal since the New Deal, but the percentage of liberals has been increasing for some time. The patterns do not vary much with the threshold used.

At first blush, this may seem surprising. But it is worth remembering that the proportion of liberals is directly related to both the percentage of Democrats in the House and how liberal the Democrats are. Before 2006, the percentage of Democrats had been on the historically low side. But because the party has been losing its more moderate and conservative members from the South, it has become a considerably more homogeneous and liberal party in the House.

So what can be said about the incoming 111th House. Unless the Democratic party’s 20 seat gain in the House is composed of almost exclusively moderates and conservatives (highly doubtful), the next House will be the most liberal in history.

Georgia Senate Race

Saxby Chambliss won reelection in the Georgia Senate run-off by a somewhat surprising margin 57-43% margin over Democrat Jim Martin. Some random thoughts:

  1. I wouldn’t yet call it an “Iron Law,” but there seems to be an emerging pattern of the newly elected president’s party losing in run-off elections. Of course, the closest parallel was in Georgia in 1992 when republican Paul Coverdell beat incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler following Bill Clinton’s presidential victory. Of course, there are big differences between the two cases. First, Chambliss, unlike Coverdell, won the plurality of the votes in November. Second, Clinton, unlike Obama, won Georgia’s electoral votes. So Chambliss’s victory is not nearly surprising as Coverdell’s was.
  2. Political scientists and economists such as Alberto Alesina, Howard Rosenthal, and Mo Fiorina have offered a “balancing” explanation as to why the new president’s party performs poorly in these special elections and in midterm elections generally. The basic idea is that most voters are more ideological moderate than the two parties and therefore would like to balance them through divided government. Such balancing is hard to do during a presidential election due to the uncertainty surrounding the presidential contest. If a voter splits her ticket to obtain balance but guesses wrong on the presidential race, she’s only made matters worse. But in a special or midterm election, voters have a clear opportunity to promote balance by voting against the president’s party.
  3. There may be other explanations as well for the presidential slump. Perhaps there is buyer’s remorse. Probably not the case here. Obama seems just as popular now as when he was elected. Perhaps winners get lazy and losers get fired up. Because it was a fairly exhilarating victory for the Democrats and a very disheartening loss for the Republicans, this doesn’t seem that plausible either.
  4. Much of the focus on the runoff centered on its potential to create a “filibuster-proof” Democratic majority in the Senate. I’ve been fairly skeptical that getting to 60 is somehow magical. Yes, 60 is better than 59 and 60 may be more better than 59 than 59 is better than 58. But I don’t think there was nearly so much riding on this race as some have suggested. First, the academic literature on the Senate has failed to find a discontinuous advantage in reaching the filibuster margin. The best book on the subject (written by Eric Schickler of Berkeley and Greg Wawro of Columbia) finds that many important piece of legislation pass with a less than 60 vote margin (in other words, the opponents of legislation often fail to fully exploit there opportunity to obstruct). Second, it seems plausible that Maine’s Olympia Snow and Susan Collins will be almost as reliable a vote for Obama’s initiatives than the southern moderate Martin.
  5. A lot of heavy hitters campaigned in Georgia during the runoff (Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Sarah Palin, etc). But the heaviest hitter of them all, President-elect Obama, sat this one out except for making some radio ads. This contrasts to Bill Clinton’s extensive activities on behalf of Fowler in 1992. I have lots of hypotheses (but alas little data) as to why Obama stayed in Chicago. The first is that he believes the “balancing” theory and didn’t want to remind voters of this opportunity. The second is that he agrees with me about relative unimportance of the 60th vote in the Senate (or he knows something about the Minnesota recount that I don’t). The third is the most plausible. He’s worked very hard in his transition to live up to his post-partisan promises. Travelling to Georgia in the midst of an economic crisis to give a partisan political speech would have undone much of this.

Polarized America

In 2006, I published Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches with my colleagues Keith Poole of UC San Diego and Howard Rosenthal of New York University.

Here’s the cover blurb:

The idea of America as politically polarized–that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states–has become a cliché. What commentators miss, however, is that increasing polarization in recent decades has been closely accompanied by fundamental social and economic changes–most notably, a parallel rise in income inequality. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.

The authors find that polarization and income inequality fell in tandem from 1913 to 1957 and rose together dramatically from 1977 on; they trace a parallel rise in immigration beginning in the 1970s. They show that Republicans have moved right, away from redistributive policies that would reduce income inequality. Immigration, meanwhile, has facilitated the move to the right: non-citizens, a larger share of the population and disproportionately poor, cannot vote; thus there is less political pressure from the bottom for redistribution than there is from the top against it. In “the choreography of American politics” inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

Links to several reviews and discussions of the book follow the jump.

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Welcome

The impending inauguration of a new president seems like as good a time as any to inaugurate this new forum for the discussion of American politics and policymaking.

I hope to keep the scope fairly broad. Of course, there will be the daily lure of current events as President Obama puts together an administration and pushes a legislative agenda (and perhaps Congress pushes back!). But I also hope to share some thoughts and stimulate discussion of broader issues about the current state of American democracy. And as a working political scientist, I hope this will be a forum for the discussion of important political, social, and economic research on pressing public problems.

To tide readers over until I can get some new stuff up, the next few posts will link to some of my recently published opinion pieces.

My official bio is after the jump.

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