Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off: ' Ideology: Here's one of those topics where a picture'or in this case, two pictures'really is worth a thousand words: The Guardian's Harry Enten features a pair of charts from Voteview.com (the guardians of the DW-NOMINATE archive) that track the average DW-N score of the two parties over the decades, going back to the 1870s. DW-N scores empirically rank each legislator (and each party) along a spectrum from negative 1 (most liberal) to positive 1 (most conservative) without making any judgment calls about which votes to include and which to exclude, because it automatically counts every vote.
The first graph below is for the Senate and the second is for the House; both show parallel movement, suggesting that polarization isn't just limited to the extensively gerrymandered lower chamber (click the images for larger versions):
Importantly, the charts also show just how one-sided the increasing polarization of Congress has been, as, since the early `70s, the Democrats' average score has stayed level (in the -0.35 range) even with the gradual loss of the southern white conservaDems ... but the Republicans have gotten a little more conservative each cycle, moving up to at least a 0.5 (meaning they're significantly more conservative than the Democrats are liberal). There are probably a variety of explanations for this shift beginning in the early `70s'the solidification of each party's base in the wake of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," the beginnings of the rise of the "religious right"'but one important, often overlooked factor may be the steps take by the conservative movement toward the development of a right-wing Beltway financial and intellectual infrastructure (in the wake of the Powell Memorandum), which was instrumental in instilling greater conservative discipline within Republican members of Congress. (David Jarman & David Nir)
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