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voteview / WebVoteView

Webbased rollcall vote visualization software
MIT License
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"Most conservative" plot calculations #313

Closed adamboche closed 6 years ago

adamboche commented 7 years ago

https://voteview.com/person/21300/kyrsten-sinema https://voteview.com/person/40915/joe-manchin-iii

These both said "The most conservative Democrat of the 114th Congress". One member is in the House and the other's in the Senate, so I changed the writing to say that instead, but then I found this other one that now says "more conservative than 67% of Democrats in the 114th Senate" but I think the 67% is not chamber-specific. So in this case, the original wording was correct. https://voteview.com/person/49308

114th Congress for each.

Am I misinterpeting something here?

adamboche commented 6 years ago

We've gotten several emails about this issue. I'm not sure at this point if it's just a matter of rewriting the explanation or if there's a bug in the display.

JeffreyBLewis commented 6 years ago

Seems to me that we should make both quantities chamber specific.

aaronrudkin commented 6 years ago

Yeah this is weird. I will take a look at how this is working. I did think they were chamber specific.

aaronrudkin commented 6 years ago

Yeah, I see some of what's going on here. It's a bit of a mess -- complicated a bit that Luke grafted the party loyalty stuff on top of it. I haven't done any rewriting of the person page yet, but I'll fix this text first.

From what I can see there is some conflation of chamber specific / non-chamber specific measures, and also a rounding error that's going to impact the "most Conservative / Liberal" claim. I'll fix both.

aaronrudkin commented 6 years ago

The dev version now reflects accurate labels. The labels provided, are in order:

  1. If the member is the most liberal/conservative in the entire congress, say that
  2. If the member is the most liberal/conservative in the entire chamber, say that
  3. If they are not superlative, then
    • Report that they are more liberal/conservative than X% of the entire chamber
    • Report that they are more liberal/conservative than X% of their party in chamber

And the histograms now reflect per-chamber NOMINATE distributions rather than across-congress.

So, examples: http://128.97.229.160/person/41301/elizabeth-warren <-- Most liberal http://128.97.229.160/person/21726/pramila-jayapal <-- Most liberal representative http://128.97.229.160/person/21721/thomas-alexander-jr-garrett <-- Most conservative http://128.97.229.160/person/41110/mike-lee <-- Most conservative senator http://128.97.229.160/person/40915/joe-manchin-iii <-- Most conservative Democrat in the Senate http://128.97.229.160/person/49703/susan-margaret-collins <-- Most liberal Republican in the Senate http://128.97.229.160/person/21512/carlos-curbelo <-- A Liberal Republican in the House, but not the most Liberal http://128.97.229.160/person/20343/timothy-j-ryan <-- No superlative at all.

I have not touched the party loyalty stuff yet, I am still thinking about the display here.

aaronrudkin commented 6 years ago

Closing and we can address party loyalty stuff in #347