Following on my response to Ezra (see also Ezra again and Sarah), a Monkey Cage reader asks:
Isn’t the way to assess the relative role of polarization & Senate rules to compare Congress to contemporary state legislatures that lack the role of the Senate but have the versions of the two national parties in incarnations fairly similar to the federal versions of the parties? For example, Missouri, Ohio, WA, MI, PA have parties that bear real similarities to the national parties (whereas, say, KY, MA, VA, ME, NH, CO do not).
Thanks to Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty, we are just now getting good estimates of ideology within state legislatures. But I don’t know of anyone who has tried to leverage state legislatures in a way like that proposed by this reader.
If any reader has any thoughts, please leave them in comments.
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Also, for anyone interested — Seth Masket has ideal points for the California Assembly from 1901-2003 available on his website. Projects like these are invaluable for researchers trying to learn more about polarization and the influence of institutional rules.
I have enjoyed reading a lot of the discussion lately on polarization.
One thing that that sometimes gets lost in discussions of polarization, however, is that the consequences aren’t always bad. In fact, there is some research by Hetherington (2008), Abramowitz and Saunders (2008), and a paper that I’ll be presenting with a colleague of mine at WPSA on Friday that show that polarization stimulates the political engagement of citizens (things like voting, registration, interest, identification with the major political parties, etc.).
That payoff of engagement might be a high price to pay for the gridlock created in governing, however.
It will be exciting to see what researchers find when we get more and more data on various state legislatures. And, when researchers can look into natural experiments like the one suggested here…
Our project will precisely allow people to compare parties at the national and state levels. The idea is to put state legislatures into common space with each other AND with Congress. See the latest paper draft on my website for more.
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