Know Thy Enemy

I'm still working on the final post on the Scorecard of the House, but I've finished putting together a Nolan Chart with the scores of the Republicans on it. Take a look.

I had some problems with trying to indicate just how many Congressmen were at a specific point. At times the large numbers made it look like a big blob. But I think you can get the general idea. Ron Paul is up there as the sole libertarian. There are a handful of conservatives, but the vast majority of Republicans are in the right-wing of authoritarianism. I've put the average for the House Republicans on there as an indication of how the party as a whole looks. Compare it to the Democratic party in the House.

I've split the parties into two graphs so it's easier to see how much more the Democratic Party is spread out. The bulk of the party is within the centrist portion of left-liberalism, but there is a large number trailing off into authoritarianism. There's certainly a lot more control within the GOP.

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Okay, that is one of the coolest and most important graphics I've yet seen.

These graphs need to be linked all over the web. This is tremendous stuff.

I've got a diary at Daily Kos trying to spread this message: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/30/142749/772

Logan, I think your Nolan charts reinforce the "Freedom Democrat" message: the wide spread of Democrat politicians shows that there is room for more libertarian, freedom-friendly ideas within the Democratic Party that in the GOP. Plus the Democratic blob is closer to the Libertarian corner. :)

thanks for that great work!

Logan,

Nice work. I created similar charts based on the 2005 voting records of Texas State House and Texas State Senate members. In the House most of the Republicans ended up at the meeting point of the Centrist, Conservative and Libertarian quadrants. (Six ended up in the Libertarian quadrant. Three fairly strongly so.) Meanwhile most of the Democrats ended up at the meeting point of the Centrist, Liberal and Authoritarian quadrants. None were close to the Libertarian quadrant.

The State Senate was not so clearcut. The members were scattered about in the Centrist quadrant with an average tendency to skew liberal and authoritarian. Only 1 was a borderline Conservative and none were particularly Libertarian.

I think that studies of this kind are quite useful and informative. I hope that other libertarian minded people create similar charts so that your analysis can be cooborated (or not.) Hopefully you will publish the list of the votes that you used to create your data.

did the data come from in order to generate the charts?

I created a scorecard of votes on social issues (http://freedomdemocrats.org/HouseScorecard01Social) and economic issues (http://freedomdemocrats.org/HouseScorecard01Economic). You can also see in the upper right hand corner of the website previous scorecards I've done. One's based on votes from Ron Paul's Liberty Committee and the other is the Senate from the previous session of Congress.

Wow, great work getting this data together. Interesting to see that (from your chart at least) the republicans have abandoned any pretense of being fiscally conservative and have moved south in the chart.

However, I think it is worse than we think... an important axis that we often forget in the awesome two-dimensionality of the Nolan chart is the "strength" axis: Where are a person's convictions strongest?
Conservatives care much more about social control than they do about economic freedom. Liberals care much more about economic control than they do about social freedom. Both are willing to compromise on freedom as long as they get to control what they want, thus, instead of the country trending to the average of Liberals and Conservatives it trends ever to the Totalitarian quadrant.

Can we Libertarians use your work to make some sort of decision? I think so: Another thing I'd love to see (perhaps by shading in color strength) would be the percentage of the vote that each of your 'points' got in the last election. With that we would be able to see which districts would be worth more to attack: the weakest candidate who's most consistently worse. Focus LP campaigns (and money) on those and we might have something.