![Eric Ostermeier has a nice post about the profile of the Tea Party Caucus. I thought I would look quickly at the roll call voting behavior of the caucus members relative to the rest of the House and the GOP.
For the 111th House, the mean of the Tea Party Caucus members on the first dimension of DW-NOMINATE is .7 and for Republican non-caucus members the mean is .61. On the second dimension, the Tea Party Caucus mean is .15 and for non-caucus members it is -.06. Both these differences are statistically significant.
Update. Ari wants me to tell him what this means. I think it just means that the Tea Party Caucus members are among the more conservative members of the GOP. To the extent that we might think that there are two dimensions structuring US political debate (one dividing the parties on economic issues, the second on social and cultural issues), Tea Party Caucus members tend to be those that exhibit what we’d cautiously interpret as more conservative behavior on both dimensions. I don’t think this is surprising, those members of Congress who are choosing to identify as Tea Partiers are those who choose to vote a little bit more conservatively than their peers in the Republican Party.
If there is anything interesting here, it’s a suggestion (through the differences on the second dimension) that those members of the House choosing to affiliate with the Tea Party aren’t likely to vote like Republican libertarians in the Ron Paul mold. They’re more like Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann.
Sources:
[1] Members of the Tea Party Caucus
[2] DW-NOMINATE Scores from Royce Carroll, Jeff Lewis, James Lo, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l60ue3GELS1qzv41zo1_500.png)
Eric Ostermeier has a nice post about the profile of the Tea Party Caucus. I thought I would look quickly at the roll call voting behavior of the caucus members relative to the rest of the House and the GOP.
For the 111th House, the mean of the Tea Party Caucus members on the first dimension of DW-NOMINATE is .7 and for Republican non-caucus members the mean is .61. On the second dimension, the Tea Party Caucus mean is .15 and for non-caucus members it is -.06. Both these differences are statistically significant.
Update. Ari wants me to tell him what this means. I think it just means that the Tea Party Caucus members are among the more conservative members of the GOP. To the extent that we might think that there are two dimensions structuring US political debate (one dividing the parties on economic issues, the second on social and cultural issues), Tea Party Caucus members tend to be those that exhibit what we’d cautiously interpret as more conservative behavior on both dimensions. I don’t think this is surprising, those members of Congress who are choosing to identify as Tea Partiers are those who choose to vote a little bit more conservatively than their peers in the Republican Party.
If there is anything interesting here, it’s a suggestion (through the differences on the second dimension) that those members of the House choosing to affiliate with the Tea Party aren’t likely to vote like Republican libertarians in the Ron Paul mold. They’re more like Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann.
Sources:
[1] Members of the Tea Party Caucus
[2] DW-NOMINATE Scores from Royce Carroll, Jeff Lewis, James Lo, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.
