Relativity in Ideology

It’s been a dizzying week for me, with a whole bunch of press and blogosphere attention to my previous post about Dede Scozzafava in the special race for the 23rd Congressional District in New York.

These included mentions, amongst others, by David Brooks (NYT), Frank Rich (NYT), Kevin Drum (Mother Jones), and Andrew Sullivan (The Atlantic).

My little web site, which normally sees maybe a couple dozen visits a week, swelled into the thousands last week. This really shows the power of academically oriented blogs like The Monkey Cage and FiveThirtyEight, not to mention the individual following of my friend and co-author Andrew Gelman to push new political science research into the debate on currently unfolding political events.

I’d previously gotten some attention for my book with Andrew, but that was for analyzing past elections, not a current one. This is a great development for us political scientists, who’ve too often watched from the sidelines as pundits have monopolized the public debate with analysis too often done by gut instinct alone.

A lot of the commentators who read my research have inferred too much from it, however. My tongue-in-cheek post was intended to tweak the conventional wisdom. Rather than Scozzafava being too liberal, I called her moderately conservative. The punch line, of course, was that the context for this label was that she was moderately conservative … relative to the New York State legislature, and its Republican caucus!

Too many commentators forget that context, and only focused on the first part of my post. That is, they claimed my research showed that Scozzafava was moderately conservative, period.

But that’s not right. The terms liberal and conservative have no fixed meaning in the American political context (one might say in political philosophy in general). They are terms which are meaningful for American politicians  only in context. New York isn’t Texas, but they both have Democratic and Republican parties, and they both have self-described liberals and conservatives. Needless to say, New York liberal doesn’t necessarily coincide with Texas liberal (except perhaps inside Austin), nor New York conservative with Texas conservative. The key question is: conservative or liberal, relative to what?

So, yes, Scozzafava’s a moderate conservative, relative to Albany Republicans, and to New York legislators in general. But that’s only because Albany Republicans are really liberal (relative to parties in other states), and because New York’s Legislature is really, really liberal. And as I mentioned in my original post, she was seeking to replace John McHugh, someone considerably more conservative than she.

So it perhaps makes sense that she might have been cross-endorsed by the Working Families Party in the past, or that her husband is a big labor leader, or that she’s now turned around and endorsed the Democratic candidate since her departure from the race.

Thus, it is simultaneously true that she is moderately conservative in her state legislative context and liberal in the American Republican context, or with respect to the replacement of the 23rd district incumbent, or the rest of the New York delegation.

There is one remaining question. How conservative was she in relation to the voters of the 23rd District? Nate Silver, who’s a pretty sharp fellow (and a University of Chicago alum), in the course of responding to arguments from liberals who claim a Hoffman win would actually be good for liberals, writes:

[D]o Democrats really want to be celebrating if an extreme conservative like Hoffman … is able to win a very middle-of-the-road district like NY-23? …. But if a Glenn Beck-ian conservative is able to win a district that shares a frontier with Vermont and Canada, ought that not be at least a little bit worrying for Democrats in terms of the mood of the country?

There are two claims here. First, Hoffman is an extreme conservative. Second, he’s extreme relative to the district. Is he right? Maybe, but Silver doesn’t have the evidence to back up his conjecture. Both claims are extremely hard questions to solve objectively. More on this in a later post…

 

Scozzafava is a Conservative Republican (in New York)

A special election to replace Representative John McHugh (R) is being held in the conservative 23rd District located in northern New York State. State Assemblywoman Deirdre (Dede) Scozzafava is the Republican candidate, attorney Bill Owens is the Democratic candidate, and there’s a prominent Conservative party candidate in Douglas Hoffman (minor parties are much more important in New York than other states for a variety of reasons).

Scozzafava has been assailed from the right for being far too liberal. For example, the libertarian Wall Street Journal this morning wrote of her that:

Democrats want to portray this race as a familiar moderate-conservative GOP split, but the real issue is why Ms. Scozzafava is a Republican at all. She has voted for so many tax increases that the Democrat is attacking her as a tax raiser. She supported the Obama stimulus, and she favors “card check” to make union organizing easier, or at least she did until a recent flip-flop.She has run more than once on the line of the Working Families Party, which is aligned with Acorn. Her voting record in Albany puts her to the left of nearly half of the Democrats in the assembly. She also favors gay marriage, which is to the left of Mr. Obama.

The conservative National Review writes:

In spite of its having gone for Obama in 2008, the district’s history suggests that it is basically conservative; Ms. Scozzafava is basically not. Boy, is she not: Not only pro-choice and in favor of homosexual marriage — common if distasteful concessions to the secular liberals’ agenda — she also supports some of the most odious items on the Left’s wish-list, including the “card check” initiative that would put a big cudgel in the hands of Big Labor while effectively disenfranchising millions of American workers who may not desire to become Teamsters, SEIU members, or similar. She signed the Americans for Tax Reform pledge to oppose tax hikes but immediately declared that she was not bound by having done so. It is no surprise that she is supported by the public-employees unions, ACORN — and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga. (Really.)

A recent bizarre incident recently occurred when John McCormack, a writer at the conservative Weekly Standard, had to answer to the cops after asking about Scozzafava’s issue positions.

It was a fairly typical evening–until the speech ended and someone with Scozzafava’s campaign  called the police. On me.

Despite the laundry list of liberal issue positions held by Scozzafava, my research with Princeton’s Nolan McCarty on ideology in American state legislatures shows that the Assemblywoman is actually a conservative Republican. Wait for it. Wait for it… In New York.

Her ideological “common space” score is 0.02. These scores, similar but far superior to interest group ratings, put state legislators around the country on the same scale with each other, as well as with members of Congress. Liberals have lower scores; conservatives higher ones.

The most liberal legislator in New York state from that served anytime between 1996-2003 is Democratic Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan (Rosie O’Donnell’s brother), with a score of -2.9. One of the most conservative is Republican Robert DiCarlo of Staten Island, with a score of 1.64. DiCarlo was a titled a “maverick” Republican (!) for his conservative views on issues such as abortion by the New York Times.

Scozzafava’s score puts her in the 58th percentile of her party, which makes her slightly more conservative than the average Republican legislator in Albany, so she’s a conservative in her party. For example, she’s more conservative than James Tedisco, who lost a special election to succeed Kirsten Gillenbrand in the 20th District (score: -.22 and in the most liberal fifth of the party). In the legislature as a whole, she’s in the 83rd percentile, which makes her a conservative in Albany in general. Compare her, say, to Republican Thomas Morahan of the 38th Senate District (Rockland County, just across the border from the New Jersey town where I went to high school). He scores a very liberal -0.54, or in the most liberal 2% of his party. No wonder that his party affiliations include the Working Families Party, which is closely associated with organized labor (and ACORN). So she’s no Morahan.

But, of course, she’s a New York Republican and conservative. And if you thought that Republican equals conservative, and Democratic equals liberal, you’d be pretty far off when looking at America’s 50 state legislatures. New York’s Republicans (along with Massachusetts’, Connecticut’s, Hawaii’s, and New Jersey’s) are the most liberal in the country, so much so that Democrats in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina are all more conservative on average.

Here’s a picture of where New York rates ideologically relative to the other states and Congress over the past decade. The grey lines represent, for comparison, the ideology of Congressional Democrats and Republicans in approximately the same time period.

The New York legislature is one thing, and Congress is quite another. If Scozzafava were to win the election, she’d be replacing Representative John McHugh. He scores at 0.4, which is pretty liberal for a Republican (hence his nomination by President Obama), but far more conservative than Scozzafava.

American political parties are wild, diverse beasts, and New York is a perfect example of that. Which makes doing research in this area lots of fun.

Update: It’s quite heartening that this post has made its rounds in the blogosphere. But, a note of caution. The data that lie behind this post and form the basis for the chart are preliminary and subject to change as we update our work.