I posted one of Royce Carroll’s automatically generated graphs illustrating congressional votes via an optimal classification method. And these have been kicking around the blogosphere a bit. Andrew Gelman chimes in with the important cautionary note that it’s not clear how the second axis of these charts should be interpreted.
Back in the day, congressional votes exhibited a strongly two dimensional character, with one dimension reflecting economic issues and the other reflecting racial issues. In the post Civil Rights era, the status of the second dimension is much less clear. Arguably it reflects “social issues” as it’s labeled, but arguably it doesn’t.
Update
Actually the argument that that second dimension reflects social issues looks like a pretty bad argument. Consider how it has a Democrat from Vermont listed as more socially conservative than Republican senators from Indiana, Tennessee, and Arizona.
Previous in TP Yglesias
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