Average DW-NOMINATE scores of Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives. Source: http://voteview.com/political polarization_2015.htm
There is currently a diary on the rec list titled "The Democrats Have Moved to the Right and Other Myths" showing the data above from DW-NOMINATE. While this data is accurate based on all legislative votes in Congress, it is inaccurate to extrapolate that data to specific issues. Following are quotes from the article "Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?" on the voteview website, co-written by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who compiled the data for DW-NOMINATE:
First, what little ideological shift there is to the left is mostly explained by moderate Dems being replaced by Republicans. The Blue Dogs, (or “Republican-lite” or “DINOs”) have been abandoned by the voters.
The slight liberal drift of the Democrats is compositional in nature. Moderate Democrats from the South have been replaced by conservative Republicans The few remaining southern Democrats are now heavily African-American, representing minority-majority districts. The change has made for a smaller, more liberal group of southern Democrats. However, Democrats as a whole have not moved much to the left
Second, the economic lurch to the right of 1990s Democrats led directly to deregulation of the banks which in turn led to today’s level on inequality.
Our findings do not, however, suggest that the Democrats continue to support policies that would reduce inequality as much as they did in the New Deal. After all, nineteenth-century Democrats, centered on populist southern whites, supported railroad regulation and antitrust legislation, and in this sense were to the economic left of current Democrats. The Democratic party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this legislation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism, including the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1993, which eliminated previous restrictions on interstate banking and branching; the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act that had separated commercial banking from other financial services; and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps.
Finally, the definition of “liberal” in each Congress changes significantly, as do the bills that come up for votes. While Dems may have moved right on economic issues, they have certainly become more tolerant of social issues such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. The racist Southern Dems are gone and changing social attitudes toward LGBT are now a polarizing political issue where 30 years ago almost all Congress would have come down on the “conservative” side.
What makes a legislator liberal or conservative evolves over time. Part of the changed mapping is found in the Democrats’ embrace of environmental protection, a public and normal good where demand is likely to increase with income. Similarly, in a quantitative analysis of party platforms, Geering (1998) has documented that the Democratic agenda has shifted away from general social welfare to policies that target ascriptive identities of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
There is much more in the article, though is mostly goes on to discuss money in politics, voter participation, and contributions. There is little more talk about whether Democrats are more or less “liberal”, but I thought this was an interesting graph on where political contributions come from:
I encourage you to read the entire article yourselves.
I’m going to purposefully end the diary here and not go too deep into the “myths” listed in the other diary. The only point I wanted to make is that diary jumped to some pretty big conclusions based on generalized data. I hope that the Democratic Party eventually realizes that it is losing a large part of the voting population (generally to apathy, not the Republicans) because they continue to support many economic policies that work against the 99%. And I believe the way to get those voters back is to listen to their issues, not scold them about how “liberal” current Democrats are or how horrible Republicans are.
