Data is online

I procrastinated a bit, but the W-NOMINATE data for the NH House from 1999 - 2012 is now online at Google Drive, if anyone wants to look through it. I just uploaded the entire file straight from my computer, so it also contains helpful notes that I kept for myself, the programs I wrote to make the process more manageable, and some other things.

Next on the agenda-

1) DW-NOMINATE, a program that allows direct comparisons between legislative sessions. I finally found the program online, but I'm having trouble using it. I'll have to email Keith Poole about it.

2) Party influence comparisons.
Seth Masket's fantastic book No Middle Ground, which inspired my NOMINATE project, includes graphs comparing legislators' ideological positions with the liberalness (or conservative-ness) of their districts. The idea is to see who legislators represent -- their party or their district?

I made a similar graph in 2011 using New Hampshire LDI's, though I didn't post it at the time.

You would expect to see a straight diagonal line if legislators were perfectly representing their districts. If they were perfectly representing their parties instead, you would see two horizontal lines, one for each party. In this graph, it looks like they might be representing their districts more than their parties, though it's hard to tell. They don't seem to be representing anyone very accurately.

It would be nice to compare this through the years, but it'll take some work to get the data.

3) Senate NOMINATE scores. I have the data, so I will get the older state senate W-NOMINATE scores sooner or later.

14 years of the New Hampshire House (in W-NOMINATE)

This is based on data taken from the General Court website, which only provides the most recent party affiliation of each legislator, so some legislators in earlier years may have incorrect party labels.

Watch as the middle slowly erodes. Independent and hybrid representatives are disappearing, too, another sign that party activists are gradually exerting more control over elections.

The moderates of 1999

I'm working through older voting data right now, from 1999 to 2010. Over the past week I've been laboriously scraping that data from the General Court website.

Right off the bat, the results are striking. This is the House of Representatives in 1999:

There are so many moderates! There's supposed to be a gaping void in the middle!

So the hypothesis that the House is growing more polarized? Mark that one down as "confirmed".

Who votes for marijuana reform? And some predictions

Since this is a bit wonk-ish, I decided to put my predictions up front. The explanation (and some cool graphs) are below.

This is what I expect to see from the House of Representatives in the next two years on marijuana issues:

81% of votes in support of medical marijuana
54% of votes in support of marijuana decrim
32% of votes in support of marijuana legalization

According to this, decriminalization has a better than even chance of passing the house. I don't know what the margin of error is on these, so I can't say exactly how high the odds are, but higher than 50%, at least. (I'm sure my newly elected state representative -- drug warrior Delmar Burridge, from Keene -- will be upset about that!)

Legalization garnered much less support than decriminalization, and likely won't pass this session. But it's nearly a certainty that New Hampshire will have medical marijuana within the next two years, since Maggie Hassan has vowed not to veto it.

Stark choices in NH Congressional races

I haven't been following NH Congressional races very closely. And, even if I wanted more information, I'm not sure where I could get it. At least in NH2, both campaigns are full of utterly useless information: "[Ann Kuster says] 'Eff him!'" and "Charlie Bass voted for Congressional pay raises 3 times." (Oh, the horror!)

So I was happy to see that Boris Schor at the University of Chicago has put together a measure-- similar to NOMINATE-- of U.S. Congressional candidates' ideologies.

Unlike the scores I usually work with, these range from -3 (very liberal) to +3 (very conservative).

With the exception of Charlie Bass, all NH candidates are more extreme than the average of their parties. Bass scores a surprising (to me) +0.2, putting him near the center. Here are the scores:

Candidate Scores

NH1	D	Carol Shea-Porter	−1.33
NH1	R	Frank Guinta	1.64
NH2	D	Ann Kuster	−1.73
NH2	R	Charles Bass	0.2

Now this is information we can actually use!

Visit Boris' blogs here, here, and here for more details.

This is what I'll do with NOMINATE, if I can ever get older NH voting data:

Actually, I don't think I can do this in R. But it was fun to see NOMINATE data turned into an xkcd graph. Click the image to visit the xkcd page.

[Edit: It would really be pretty easy to put something like this together, now that I think about it...]

New NOMINATE data!

It's been a long time since I've updated the NOMINATE data stored on this site. In fact, I've never updated it, because the memory of copying responses to roll call votes hundreds of times and pasting them into a spreadsheet turned me off to the idea.

Fortunately, I've been learning some programming (in Ruby and in Python), so I wrote a program to build the voting list for me instead. It's much pleasanter this way! I've also tried to improve the graphs by getting to know R better (as you can tell from above). Now the whole process takes only 5 or 10 minutes.

Within the next week I expect to release the Ruby code for my vote sorting program (I already posted it at Google Drive, but I want to clean it up a bit), along with simple instructions for getting W-NOMINATE data yourself. And hopefully I will be able to get data from earlier years, to add another dimension of fun to this.

Can't wait for the next legislative session to start! It will be much more interesting, examining this data in real time! It'll be possible to use this data to try to predict the outcomes of House and Senate votes in advance, among other things.

--The new data, including more graphs of the House and Senate and a list of legislators, is over here.

PS: William O'Brien didn't have a score before, because he was practically always "Presiding" instead of voting. He now has enough votes to get a score -- (0.72, -0.69).

W-NOMINATE page finished

I've finally organized all of the W-NOMINATE data, creating better looking graphs and outsourcing much of the data to Google Docs.

Link.

Fallacy of composition, W-NOMINATE version

I've been neglecting my blog lately. Much of the reason is that I've been working to understand the political science program NOMINATE, so that I can gather information about the ideological make-up of the New Hampshire legislature.

The data is posted on the W-NOMINATE page of my blog. Here's the cool graph (click to enlarge):

Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, the main developers of the program, claim that the program measures economic attitudes on the x-axis, and, in recent years, social attitudes on the y-axis.

At first blush this is what it appeared to be doing for New Hampshire legislators. However, after taking a closer look at the votes, I discovered that it's not doing this. At least, not very well.

The x-axis measures economic issues well, and correlates beautifully with the House Republican Alliance's scorecard ratings. (See this impressive graph, courtesy of Seth Cohn.) The y-axis, on the other hand, has issues. Apparently, because there have been so few votes on social issues this year, there is little basis for the y-values. Mostly they reflect positions on gun rights and criminal justice issues, with pro-gun and tough on crime on the bottom.

This is yet another reminder that politics at the state level does not necessarily imitate politics at the federal level.

Thanks to Rep. Seth Cohn, Scott Pauls at Dartmouth, and professor Jason Sorens for criticism and help. Peer review fixed my mistake.