The Monkey Cage

but is Daily kos particularly left-leaning. If by that you mean against the right-wing in America, then i would agree, but otherwise i would say they are pretty centrist. It seems like you have taken as correct the idea that the Democrats actually represent a pole at the left of the political spectrum, when the Dems are basically a centrist organization. Real left wing thought hasn’t had a platform in America since Henry Wallace, except for a little bit in the 1960s

Henry,

I think this is a very helpful clarification, but BillCinSD is making a key point: there is some slippage here between consistency (being on the same side of issue after issue) and extremity (having a view on an issue that is particularly radical). When various people have argued that the netroots isn’t very ideological, I don’t think they (or you) meant that netroots denizens were not particularly consistent vis a vis holding liberal views on many different issues. What they meant was that netrootsers were not especially extreme on any of these issues. Not many leading bloggers argue for a $15/hr minimum wage, or a universal minimum income, a 90% top marginal rate on capital gains. There is an important difference here in what political scientists mean by someone “being ideological” and what activists (and I think the general public) mean by it.

Hi Rich

The mistake that I made in my earlier piece (and that others I think have made too) is that I argued that the netroots were all about making sure that the Democrats became a strong and self-confident party again, and started fighting back and winning, and didn’t have a coherent ideology beyond that, instead consisting of an alliance of convenience between liberals, moderates, and perhaps a few pissed off Republicans and maybe even social democrats mixed in there. I think that this claim is now hard to justify, given that Kossacks (and other readers of liberal blogs who we don’t graph here), tend so obviously to have strong and coherent ideological takes on US politics. This of course doesn’t mean that Jonathan Chait and others who have sought to depict the netroots as intellectual descendants of Commie-fringe type organizations are right; far from it. Nor (as both you and BillC say) does it mean that the netroots are substantively left wing in the way that say you and I might understand left wing (committed to some sort of social democracy at the very least). But it does mean that we should maybe start thinking about the netroots in a different way - as a movement with a clear ideological agenda, which is left of center in terms of contemporary US politics, even if it isn’t radically left wing.

First, a joke:

BillCinSD, are you saying this isn’t a platform or that this isn’t real left wing thought?

http://socialistparty-usa.org/platform/

That out of the way, Rich C says:

“There is an important difference here in what political scientists mean by someone “being ideological” and what activists (and I think the general public) mean by it.”

This makes a useful point. What Henry and John and I do in our paper is standard practice in political science. [See, e.g., the prior post by Andrew Gelman that shows some of the scalings from his work by David Park and assorted non Monkey Cage bloggers.]

We placed respondents on a scale based on a series of responses to survey questions that corresponded to salient issues on the congressional agenda in the fall of 2006. This idea has been around for at least 80 years (“Attitudes Can Be Measured”, L. L. Thurstone, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Jan., 1928), pp. 529-554). We are able to say where the left and right end of the scale is by assuming which position on each issue (minimum wage, Iraq, etc.) is the ‘left’ position and which is the ‘right’ position. This process works well in the sense that when you apply it to members of Congress, Wellstone ends up on the left and Helms ends up on the Right, when you apply it to Supreme Court justices, Stevens ends up on the left and Thomas ends up on the right, etc. But these procedures only yield relative scalings; the metrics of the scales are not substantively meaningful.

What would it take to obtain substantively meaningful scales? Many, many more assumptions about what constitutes contested concepts like `far left’, `left’, `moderate’, `right’, `far right’, and so forth. That would be an interesting project, but I think it would be more complicated to undertake than it might seem on first thought.

All that said, consistency plays a large role in political scientists’ thinking on what constitutes ideology (Sides can review the literature since Converse if he’s so inclined). I’m not clear if consistency is not part of what RichC thinks “being ideological” means to activists.

Henry: I like your work.

But “Left Wing” has an understood meaning among most people, and as I tried to explain in the other thread, you’re using the word in such a way that most people reading the op-ed will misunderstand you. It doesn’t matter what you meant, it matters what you communicated.

Maybe if you had a target audience of people reading graphs in academia, there wouldn’t be this problem. But that’s a pretty small slice of the op ed reading public. (And BTW, I came to this conclusion on my own, not having read the Daily Kos on the subject.)

Hi JJ - but John and Eric didn’t use the phrase “left wing.” They said that they “constructed a measure” and that readers of liberal blogs were clustered at the “far left” of this measure. I can certainly see how the confusion arose, but it simply isn’t what they were saying. A lot of this has to do, I think, with the weirdness of political discourse in the US, where being identified as left wing is seen as tantamount to being identified as deluded and irrelevant.

My apologies. I read the piece a few days ago when I commented.

It still makes me cringe, though, when I read “far left.” How useful is a measurement that places mainstream views at the “far left” of a spectrum? Even if you explain the data, people will still look at the picture you represent and inaccurately think “fringe.”

By the way, I would say “far right” is an epithet as well (although not “irrelevant,” unfortunately). Most people don’t want to be seen to belong to any extreme.

But JJ, readers of liberal blogs are at the far left of this distribution, and there isn’t any way around that. As Eric says, this is pretty standard issue stuff in Congressional studies (the left-to-right map of the Senate a couple of posts below, which is probably much more congenial to pro-Democrat readers, uses a more high-powered version of the same scaling technique, with lots more data based on real roll call votes). This is pretty standard issue stuff in political science. I do see why this piece was misinterpreted, but I don’t see any good way of conveying the information without using this kind of terminology - readers of liberal blogs are obviously clustered around the further leftward reaches of the scale, and readers of conservative blogs are clustered on the further rightward part. The problem here really is with the ways that terms like left and right are used in American political discourse - and that is something that is impossible to resolve in a op-ed which is really talking about something else. Nothing else in the op-ed says or implies that there is anything wrong with blog readers for being at the left and right extremes, because that’s not what the op-ed was talking about. It does seem that we’re in agreement though that this is a matter of misinterpretation; I’m a little disappointed that the Kos diarist hasn’t seen fit to put up a clarification or correction. Certainly, when I’ve blogged in the past and badly misinterpreted someone (as happens to all bloggers), I’ve tried to correct as best as I can.

I should add that I’m in agreement on the basic argument that the netroots ain’t that far to the left if you define the left, say, in terms of the European social democracy that I tend to like. But there are also real problems in inserting value judgments like this into political science research without being very careful indeed. As Eric notes, it’s very tricky indeed to come up with some substantive and universal definition of what the ‘left’ is, which is why we and other political scientists use a scale to sort out people’s relative degree of ideological coherence etc.

Flip the axis and then say that the netroots cluster on the far right. Hopefully, this will enable you to see that, semantically, the named points on your axis have an underlying metric that does not correspond to your data.

Here’s what you could do. You could change the questions. You could ask if they favor redistribution of wealth vs. reasonable increases to the minimum wage, raise taxes on capital gains to 99% vs. keeping them the way they were previously, force everyone to donate stem cells for the advancement of science vs. fund research for science on stem cells, etc.

Then all netroots readers would cluster on the far right. Cass Sunstein could then write a column about extreme views in the blogosphere consisting of those who all homogeneously believe in stem cell research, increases in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation, and keeping the status quo with regard to capital gains taxes, etc…

Hi Mike

But the point is that we do (I think) have good grounds for saying that someone who more consistently favors left-of-center opinions is indeed more leftwing than someone who has a mixture of left-and-right opinions. So the current orientation of the scale provides some useful information. The point though is that someone who is on the far left of the scale is by no means necessarily ‘far left’ in many people’s substantive sense of the term.

JJ - I presume you’re being at least partly tongue-in-cheek, but let me treat it as a serious point, because it deserves some attention. We’re working from a survey that was put together by a consortium of social scientists here - the questions weren’t chosen by us. The questions were chosen, as far as I remember, so as to provide some degree of comparability with other political science measures. But if somebody has $100,000 or so of funding, I imagine that we’d be happy to ask these new questions and see what happens;)

I know, that wouldn’t do a good job of representing the place of the left blogosphere in the electorate—there’d be too much space to the right of the end of the spectrum. But depicting them as “far left” isn’t a good representation either—there’s too much space to the left of the end of the spectrum.

We’re working from a survey that was put together by a consortium of social scientists here - the questions weren’t chosen by us.

I see. OK. Too bad you couldn’t get a richer sense of the spectrum…

Sorry, my 9:15 comment was posted before I saw your 9:09.

Just for the record, I didn’t have much trouble with the study itself (although, again, a richer spectrum might have made it more interesting). Again, my biggest disagreement was with the language in the op-ed.

Again, I enjoy your work, Dr. Farrell. And I appreciate the opportunity to comment, and your taking the time to respond.