The Administration’s Ideology
Via Henry Farrell, Nolan McCarty takes a rigorous look at the ideology of the Obama administration:
To gauge the differences between the administration and Congressional democrats, I use Keith Poole’s “common space” measurement of conservatism. This measure is an adjustment of DW-NOMINATE scores designed to facilitate comparison of the House and Senate. Each legislator is given a single conservatism score for her entire career ranging from around -1 (very liberal) to 1 (very conservative). One drawback is that these scores are only available up through the 109th Congress (2005-2006). So I can only compare the cabinet to the Democratic caucuses of that term. Another is that Bill Richardson’s score more than a decade old (but the rest continued to serve through the 110th Congress).
The following table list the conservatism scores for the administration as well as the House and Senate leaders and the medians of the caucuses.
The evidence is pretty strong that the administration lies considerably to the right of the Democrats in the House, but is reasonably representative of Senate Democrats. But only Solis comes from the most liberal wing of the party. The center of the party is well represented in powerful positions by the president, vice-president, secretary of state, and WH chief of staff while the lower cabinet is filled with more moderate Democrats and a Republican.
Needless to say, the median senator is more conservative than the median senate Democrat. And many bills can only be passed with the support of ten senators who are more conservative than the median senator. So as I was saying yesterday even if the Obama administration were to shift its position more in the direction of Nancy Pelosi, I doubt that would change many legislative outcomes. The bulk of the Obama administration is more conservative than I am, but less conservative than the pivotal members of congress.
32 Responses to “The Administration’s Ideology”
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December 23rd, 2008 at 8:55 am
This is a sham of a “liberal” administration. These are icons of the fable that has us as a “center-right” nation. Where are the true progressives in this cabinet? Obama is a phony…
http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:03 am
Political science should be banned, for the good of us all. Six of the people on the list have portfolios, so their views on other issues are irrelevant. Clinton, for instance, is progressive on health care, less progressive on foreign policy; LaHood is an outlier overall, reasonably enough, but probably not on transportation issues. And so forth.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
If we want Obama to get big legislation (health care, climate change) past the myriad choke points in the Senate, this seems like the best way for him to play it. At least, in this first Congress of his Presidency.
But he has to make sure that he plays the game in a way that, if the GOP bottles everything up in the Senate, the public is left with no doubt that the failure to act is the GOP’s fault, and we need a few more Dem Senators to help finish the job.
Because the terrain still favors us in the 2010 Senate elections, and if we can get from 59 to, say, 63, then we could even afford to lose a Nelson, a Landrieu, and a Lincoln, and still get bills through the Senate. (A recovery in progress by then would help in a big way, too.) It may well be that 2011, rather than 2009, will be the Dems’ big year for passing progressive legislation.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:37 am
I believe that for procedural reasons, the Senate Majority leader is sometimes compelled to vote against a bill that’s failing but which he favors, so that it can be brought up again later. This could lead to Daschle and Reid’s scores to skew artificially ‘conservative.’ If anything, the opposite applies to Pelosi.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 am
This seems to come close to suggesting that, so long as the Obama administration is to the left of the 60th most liberal Senator, it doesn’t really matter where on the spectrum it is. Two arguments against this line of reasoning:
1) It’s prima facie wacky.
2) Cabinet secretaries are responsible for a lot of stuff that doesn’t require legislative involvement – developing policies, enacting policies, directing funds, etc.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:36 am
Haven’t we spent the last several weeks reading articles about the power of executive orders and the damage Bush can do with them?
That’s just one example… a strong cabinet that is far to the left of the senate could accomplish quite a bit without getting congress involved.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:48 am
@neil
You’re definitely right about the Majority leader having to vote against some of his bills, but I’m not sure it’s a large enough number to skew the results.
Regardless of how liberal/progressive the Obama administration is, getting legislation passed is going to come down to keeping the Con Dems on our side and flipping 2 or 3 moderate Republicans.
Example: EFCA. Obama has to convince Lincoln to vote for it and get Spector and Collins to flip.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
DTM – I’m aware, but presumably cabinet secretaries will have influence over executive action in their domain(why accept a cabinet post otherwise?). The president doesn’t have the time to familiarize himself with all of the details and will be relying on them to varying degrees for input.
I would suspect their influence to be strongest in areas Obama hasn’t shown a particularly strong interest in.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:32 am
Example: EFCA. Obama has to convince Lincoln to vote for it and get Spector and Collins to flip.
He actually has to make sure Specter doesn’t flip, as he voted in favor of cloture before. My guess is it comes down to how scared he is of Pat Toomey’s primary challenge, which he survived by a hair four years ago.
Collins is probably a lost cause; she isn’t up for re-election for six years now and a couple of weeks ago was whining about how unfair it was that the Democrats opposed her in this past election.
I think the best chance for a Republican vote for EFCA is probably George Voinovich, who’s up in 2010. Ohio has been going blue in all the recent important statewide elections and has a strong union presence that was a huge GOTV factor for Obama and Sherrod Brown in 2006.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:39 am
All of this assumes that the partisan tilt of the cabinet means diddly poo. What matters is whether the cabinet is competent and willing to carry out Obama’s plans. If this is the most stump dumb right wing cabinet in history they can still be effective progressives if they are good at nut-cracking and follow orders. It’s Obama who steers the ship, not the median partisan index of the cabinet.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Why can’t Obama and the Democrats legislate the same way Bush and the wingnuts did– have the Senate pass a moderate bill, then get the House to pass something more extreme, then stack the deck in the conference committee?
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