Original Cin

I originally wanted to post this as a comment to this post at Marginal Revolution, but for some reason TypePad’s not letting me:

The chart is terrible mostly because (I suspect) the “X-axis” is mislabeled — it should say “economic issues” rather than “liberal-conservative,” which is also loaded with social policy meaning. It doesn’t help that it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes because of the colors used (would it really be that much more difficult to use dark cyan and pink?). The chart would then be a round version of the political diamond/Nolan Chart. Why you would ever draw one of these things as a circle, when just doing a plain old scatter plot and then turning it 45 degrees would be both easier and more readable, is beyond me. It’s more readable, although still not great, as a giant flash applet that takes up the entire screen instead of a tiny image.

Anyway, with this in mind, the chart actually does say a few interesting this. A vertical line roughly halfway through the chart would indicated that only a Senator’s view of economic issues affected their vote. The line is pretty close to vertical, so apparently this wasn’t a very ’social’ vote. Oddly, the mislabeled axis seems to have led some of the comments at Mother Jones astray — if the line were tilted clockwise, being more socially liberal would make a senator more likely to vote against defunding (holding their view on government economic policy constant). But the line tilts counterclockwise, and the far right and libertarians — small l, what few there are in the senate — voted to defund together.

If you want to see something really weird, go to http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rcarroll/currentsenatevotesb.html and have a look at chart 24 — labeled as McCain Amendment 2580 “To strike amounts available for procurement of C-17 aircraft in excess of the amount requested by the President in the budget for fiscal year 2010.” — sounds like an entirely ‘economic’ issue, but a Senator’s votes on the matter created a horizontal line, which was almost a perfect match for the Democrat’s votes!