You’ve Seen One Republican Rep, You’ve Seen Them All

It has long been a well known axiom in Washington that Republicans have much better party discipline than Democrats.  The recent battles between the Tea Party and the “establishment” has called that into question.  Ryan O’Donnell explains that it shouldn’t.

If you only take away one thing from this graph, it should be that the expected value for Republicans is nearly a perfect horizontal line. Translated into plain English, that means Republicans vote conservative almost no matter what. It doesn’t matter what type of districts they represent.

For example, the most conservative district a Democrat currently holds is an R+16 – Jim Matheson (UT-04) – where we expect a progressive score of 44.1%. Matheson votes even a bit more conservative than that, with an actual score of 41.3%.

By contrast, look at Gary Miller in CA-31. That’s the most liberal district a Republican represents (D+5), and our algorithm expects him to vote with progressives a mere 7.6% of the time. In reality, he’s only voting progressive 3.8% of the time.

In short, if a Democrat represents a moderate district (s)he votes like a moderate.  If a Republican represents one, (s)he votes like a conservative.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.