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m contribution records is that both candidates and contributors are typically active across multiple election cycles which facilitates more reliable across time comparisons see the discussion here if they were running today both bush s would locate to the left of the mean ideal point of the republican party which has become steadily more conservative over the last three decades whereas reagan would be slightly to its right candidate positions are typically stable but are subject to change especially for candidates seeking to reinvent themselves when competing for a new office this certainly describes romney predicament romney s ideal point shifts dramatically over the course of his political career romney began his career with a score of 0 59 during his failed 1994 senate bid against edward kennedy adopted a centrist position while running for governor bringing his score to 0 48 and has currently settled near the center of his party with a score of 0 78 these data come from the most recent available campaign finance records for each candidate which do not include any current presidential exploratory or candidate committees but do include state records for current and former governors and older records when the person in question has been out of office for a substantial period of time these variations in source data could potentially bias the measures in a number of ways first if candidates have shifted their ideology since their last campaign record their previous donation pattern may not reflect their current ideology for example newt gingrich s fundraising as a member of congress may not perfectly reflect his ideology today second states have different campaign disclosure thresholds than do the federal government while the federal elections commission reports the individual records of all donations made by any individual who donates to a candidate over 200 in total this disclosure threshold is lower in most states in mn and in it is 100 and in ut it is 50 since small dollar donors tend to be more ideologically extreme than large dollar access seeking donors if state candidates are receiving substantial amounts of donations in between their state and the federal disclosure thresholds these amounts could make them appear more ideologically extreme however since the candidates for whom state records are used are distributed roughly evenly across the space these differences in disclosure thresholds may not be a significant source of bias here our measure of proportion raised from small donors is also in part a function of campaign finance laws this matters for past candidates for president who fundraised subject to the 1 000 limit on individual contributions in place prior to the implementation of the bcra during the 2004 elections this discrepancy make past president look as though they raised slightly more funds in small amounts than they actually did variation in campaign finance laws matters much more for governors turned presidential candidates pawlenty daniels perry and huntsman campaigned for governor under state laws that foster very different fundraising environments we rely solely federal contribution records for romney and palin minnesota s contribution limits favor fundraising from small donors whereas limits in indiana texas and utah have no limits on the amount an individual can donate to a candidate thus favoring fundraising large amounts from a smaller set of donors this highlights that pawlenty has experience fundraising in small amounts but is not particularly informative when making comparisons to other candidates fortunately this will no longer be a problem as future fec filing deadlines approach categories uncategorized tags 2012 election ideology jon huntsman michele bachmann republican presidential primaries rick perry rick santorum ron paul rudy giuliani sarah palin tim pawlenty the changing politics of health care professionals june 6 2011 adam bonica 1 comment the new york times published a fascinating article last week about the changing politics of physicians the article reports that as more physicians abandon practices for salaried positions their politics have trended to the left this trend is also present in the contribution patterns of health care professionals the figure below tracks the changes across time in the ideological giving patterns of four groups of health care professionals surgeons nurses mental health care professionals restricted to psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and all other physicians the trends track the mean ideological position ideal point of donors within each group for each election cycle i take the subset of donors from each group that gave at least once during that cycle and calculate their ideal points based on all donations made during that cycle and cycles prior this permits the ideal point estimates to update with time here are some helpful summary statistics for interpreting the scale the mean ideal point for the entire sample of 2 5 million individual contributors which includes health care professionals is 0 16 the mean ideal point is 0 66 for democratic candidates and 0 82 for republican candidates surgeons are by far the most conservative they are also the group that was on average more conservative in 2010 than in 1990 the other three groups trend to the left in varying degrees i included nurses to emphasize that the industry has been changing as a whole i also included psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to emphasize that differences between groups is probably better understood as a function of self selection into a given profession than anything else whatever differences in pay and work conditions exist between mental health professionals and other physicians they would not be sufficient to explain the differences in ideology that mental health professionals are significantly to the left of nurses reinforces this point ideological giving patterns of health care professionals the trends track the mean ideological position of donors from each group the means are calculated from the subset of donors within each group who gave at least once during a given election cycle although revealing the trend line for physicians leaves out much of the story the mean ideological position is relatively stable but there is plenty of action in the distribution the 1994 and 2010 midterm election cycles represent the closest thing to electoral deja vu that we can expect to see in our lifetimes this makes these cycles useful points for comparison the figures below show the ideological distributions for surgeons and physicians in 1994 and 2010 the distribution for surgeons fills out a little on the left over the years but remains unimodal in contrast the distribution for physicians changes quite a bit ideologically speaking physicians have become more evenly divided and more polarized ideological distributions of physicians and surgeons donating to political campaigns during the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections these figures can help address one of the paragraphs from the article that caught my attention dr cecil b wilson the president of the a m a said that changes in doctors practice ownership status do not necessarily lead to changes in their politics and some leaders of state medical associations predicted that the changes would be fleeting i strongly suspect that dr wilson is correct in his assessment the link between doctors abandoning private practices for salaried jobs and their changing politics is probably overblown i attempted to get at this question by dividing the sample into physicians who report being self employed and physicians who report having an employer i found only a slight difference between the groups on the other hand i sincerely doubt that the changes will be fleeting the changes appear to be responding to generational shifts in particular the influx of women doctors i was curious as to whether the rightward jump observed during the 2010 midterms resulted from 1 donors that had previously given to democrats shifting their dollars to republicans or 2 increased giving by republican donors relative to democratic donors in other words was it a case of changing minds or changing wallets for each year i categorize donors into one of six categories based on their giving patterns in previous cycles strong democrat greater than 95 of donation dollars went to democrats in prior elections lean democrat between 60 and 95 of dollars went to democrats in prior elections toss up between 40 and 60 of dollars went to democrats in prior elections lean republican between 5 and 40 of dollars went to democrats in prior elections strong republican less than 5 of dollars went to democrats in prior elections new money first time donors had not given in prior elections each bar displays aggregate amounts donated to each party for example the bar labeled strong dem in the 2010 panel shows that donors who in previous cycles gave 95 or more of their dollars to democrats gave 41 million to democrats and 1 5 million to republicans partisan defections by democratic donors had little to do with the 2010 shift in favor of republicans in fact the defection rate was greater for republicans donors increased giving by republican donors and slightly reduced giving by democratic donors account for the lion s share of the swing republicans also received a larger proportion of dollars from first time donors than they had in the past republicans won 62 percent of the dollars from first donors in 2010 up from 44 percent in 2008 and 57 percent in 2006 lastly it is worth noting that the overall rightward shift during the 2010 midterms is no larger than what we saw in other industries hence i caution against concluding that the shift was in direct response to the affordable health care act categories uncategorized tags affordable health care act campaign finance health care health care professionals politics of health care ideology physicians surgeons judicial ideology and the wisconsin supreme court election april 10 2011 adam bonica leave a comment the wisconsin supreme court election between justice david prosser and assistant attorney general joann kloppenburg has received more media attention than any state judicial election in recent memory the race was extremely close but following the tide turning discovery of 14 000 unrecorded votes from waukesha county a prosser victory now appears all but certain a challenge from kloppenburg s campaign will likely lead to a recount of waukesha county along with the possibility of a federal investigation so the official outcome may take some time my co author michael woodruff and i have been working on a paper that develops a quantitative measure of state supreme court ideology based on campaign finance records i have come across several articles claiming a kloppenburg victory would swing the court to the left this naturally piqued my interest as something our measures can easily address below are the ideological measures cfscores for the current wisconsin justices as well as for kloppenburg and a few other wisconsin politicians i measure kloppenburg s ideology based on 32 campaign contributions made by her over the last two decades this sidesteps the problem of measuring kloppenburg s ideology based on a campaign that has arguably become less about her as a candidate than about opposition to governor walker s policies kloppenburg is indeed far more liberal than prosser locating near chief justice shirley abrahamson in this sense a kloppenburg victory would move the court to the left however what really matters is the resulting position of the pivotal median justice if kloppenburg wins justice roggensack will become the median justice judging by her donors roggensack is a moderate conservative not a liberal i should note that the uncertainty bound on roggensack s estimate is unusually large indicating that her donors are not an ideologically cohesive group in other words she belongs to the rare breed of candidates capable of raising funds from both liberals and conservatives that being said she raises the bulk of her funds from conservatives overall 65 percent of roggensack s donors are conservatives defined as individuals with cfscores 0 5 compared with 85 percent of prosser s donors 24 percent of justice bradley s donors and a mere one percent of abrahamson s donors i will refrain from speculating on roggensack s personal views on the union legislation or the extent to which it might influence her ruling on the matter yet i doubt she is eager for the union legislation to make it to the wisconsin supreme court if it does siding with her liberal colleagues would risk gravely upsetting the majority of her donors unfortunately siding with her conservative colleagues would similarly upset her liberal donors such is the dilemma of maintaining an ideologically diverse donor base whatever the outcome the election is an important development for the court and wisconsin politics in general as there is good reason to view the results as a proxy referendum on governor walker s policies but regardless of which side prevails the evidence suggests that the wisconsin supreme court is destined to remain in conservative hands categories uncategorized tags abrahamson judicial elections judicial ideology kloppenburg prosser roggensack scott walker state supreme courts wisconsin budget battle wisconsin supreme court introducing the 112th congress november 5 2010 adam bonica 11 comments now that the dust from the 2010 elections has cleared it is time to start looking at how the 112th congress will compare to the 111 th the figure below tracks the ideological positions of the median house member the mean democrat and the mean republican since 1988 the replacement effect of the 2010 midterm elections is unlike anything in recent memory the shift in the house median is two and a half times what was observed after the 1994 election wiping out the effect of democratic gains in the previous two elections and then some the 111 th was the most liberal congress in the past three decades the 112 th will be the most conservative the 2010 elections had a profound effect on congressional polarization not only will the 112 th house be the most polarized on record 2010 will surpass 1994 as the most polarizing election cycle the figure below helps place the historic jump in polarization in perspective it displays the ideological distributions of house members continuing on from the 111th congress alongside the distributions of the entering class of republicans and the sitting democrats they defeated two features stand out the first is that the mean entering republican 1 09 is substantially more conservative than the mean continuing republican 0 82 in total 77 percent of freshmen republicans in the 112 th congress will locate to the right of the party median from the 111 th in other words nearly 8 in 10 incoming house republicans would have been on the right wing of ...