DW-NOMINATE took a bit more work for me to understand than some other data sources, even with a bit of help from one of its creators. But I didn’t want to let commenter Tarl down, so I didn’t give up. DW-NOMINATE uses two dimensions to estimate the distance between legislators. The first one is liberalism vs conservatism, with positive numbers indicating conservative, the latter reflects regional divides with positive numbers being associated with the south/rural areas. Richard Nixon served in the 80th and 81st Congresses in the House of Representatives. His DIM1 is 0.18 and his DIM2 is -0.41, while the average for Republicans of that period is about 0.3 and -0.37, respectively. I’m rather new to using Open Office Calc/Excel so I’m not terribly confident in my work. I’ve uploaded my data file, which should contain the formula I used near the top of the sheet and to the right of the main data. If those who understand that sort of thing verify that I did it correctly, I’ll update this post to say how Nixon compared to other Republican senators that he worked alongside.
UPDATE 3: In the absence of outside verification, I used the same method for Nixon’s time in the Senate. There he had scores of 0.13 and -0.57, for Dim1 and Dim2 respectively, while his Republican peers in the Senate had about 0.26 and -0.34 on average for the 82nd Congress he served in. These scores should not be taken to indicate that he shifted in his ideology between bodies of Congress as scores in different houses are not comparable. I’m not going to upload my file for the senate because I don’t have room at my tripod site. The standard deviations for his GOP peers in the house were 0.16 and 0.32, making Nixon about 0.73 and 0.12 standard deviations below average for those dimensions. The standard deviations for the senate were about 0.19 and 0.42, making him about 0.68 and 0.55 standard deviations below average there.
UPDATE 2: My excel file (with formula and all) is now here. Its shaggy dog story is below the fold. Some months ago my hard-drive failed, taking MS Office with it. As a replacement, I had Open Office, which is very slow and annoying. When I initially did this analysis I saved it in the open document format (.ods), but then when I tested out downloading it I was informed that the file was corrupted and the “repair” removed all the data. I had the option of saving it in excel format, but that quadrupled the size and left hardly any space at my tripod site. Figuring that Open Office must not be optimized for Excel, I went to the pirate bay, failed to make any progress for a while, then copy-pasted some new trackers and in a short amount of time had MS Office back. Resaving the excel file didn’t shrink it, nor did copy-pasting from the ods file into excel. Figuring there must be formatting taking up space that was being copied over, I decided to redownload the data to open in excel and then do the analysis again. In the download window I then noticed that the original file was roughly the size of the bloated one I was trying to avoid. I guess sometimes you just have to accept things are as good as they get.
June 8, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Fascinating stuff.
Libertarians, who often fancy themselves further to the left than Republicans (with the exception of the contingent of unreconstructed conservatives – paleo-con ‘libertarians’), will take umbrage with the way these authors operationalize ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ actions in congress. On the airline bailout bill of 2001, for instance, those opposed to the bill outright (anti-corporate welfare) are ranked as more conservative than the Republicans who voted for the bill but rejected amendments pertaining to health care for airline workers.
http://voteview.com/airlinebailout.htm
June 8, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Robin Hanson why libertarians are really closer to the right here.
I actually became a libertarian when I heard of the term and realized it meant all the stuff I already believed while thinking I was an extreme right-winger. Of course that was back in the 90s when Bill Clinton’s scary jackbooted ATF agents in black helicopters sent to enforce the New World Order of the United Nations was a big concern.
I saw an earlier post on which congress-critters voted against the bailout that showed moderates and people without elections coming up were the most likely to vote in favor. The leftiest were still more favorable than the far rightiest though.
June 9, 2009 at 1:39 am
Hanson:
In the libertarian view, we should most respect “self-made” men or women, able to achieve glory with minimal help from government, family, or community, if only such meddling outsiders would get out of the way.
I agree with him overall, though I’d tweak it a bit in my case and say we should most “respect” not the glory seeker, but merely the common chump who is more interested in his or her friends, family and hobbies, and relatively less interested in world affairs or the plight of ‘humanity’ over actual humans (ok, cheap lefty caricature).
(Ironically I prefer at least half my friends be the latter sort because I need other nerds to talk to, revealing an aching self-awareness and possible anxiety that is common to rootless cosmpolitan lifestyle liberals with weak family ties, which mostly describes me.)
Anyway, in this sense it is less heroic than both the liberal’s subaltern – heroic by sheer dint of institutional oppression – and the conservative’s hard working “glory” seeker. Though it would still fall closer to the conservative side, mostly due to the “get out of the way” feature. Throw in the obviously quietist aspect of my preferred folk and it’s even more conservative.
Then again maybe Harvey Pekar and other defenders of the concept of anti-hero would find something to like. I’m fairly certain their political attitudes lean left.
Ok I’m done…
June 9, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Stirner would agree on the bit about “humanity”.
June 13, 2009 at 1:13 pm
[...] Richard Nixon: Liberal/Moderate Republican by TGGP [...]
April 4, 2012 at 4:36 am
I would say that Richard Nixon was a moderate Eisenhower Republican. He believed in Civil Rights, moderate forms of the New Deal and the Great Society. He was not a Reagan Republican, nor was he a follower of liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller. History has not been kind to him so far; however, I am sure it will be in the future. He did get us out of Vietnam and did establish the beginnings of a post-Cold War world. I am a liberal Truman/Johnson Democrat; however, I do respect Nixon. May the Lord Jesus forgive him and may his immortal spirit be at rest in the third heaven until our Lord’s Second Coming. I owe Nixon, because I probably would have died in Vietnam.