You say that politics is multi-dimensional, but the historical evidence, internationally, is that this normally isn't the case, not to any significant extent.
Take your examination of what issues mean out of the picture for a minute. Then look at who votes with who how often. If there were two issues that dominate things (e.g. bigtax/littletax; morally-prescriptive/morally-liberal) we would expect significant spread on two dimensions. If, however, one issue dominates, then spread is minimal along the second dimension.
What we see is that almost all of politicians' voting behaviour in the US and Europe is explained by a single variable. Call that variable what you will, but they line up along with declared socioeconomic concerns. The occasional person / politician will have an issue where two groups from different parties will agree out of that main alignment (European "non-centrist" groups partnering up on national protections such as tariffs), but such items are usually overwhelmed by the single-axis lineup.
In the recent Australian context, such analysis doesn't work well, since we had two parties that were effective caucuses. Other two-party systems like the US aren't so disciplined, and Europe has plenty of multi-party legislatures, and their evidence is pretty strong.
Poole and Rosenthal's analyisis of US patterns are at: http://voteview.com/ It's been a while since I looked at the European stuff, so I don't know where to find it off-hand
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-04-14 11:56 am (UTC)Take your examination of what issues mean out of the picture for a minute. Then look at who votes with who how often. If there were two issues that dominate things (e.g. bigtax/littletax; morally-prescriptive/morally-liberal) we would expect significant spread on two dimensions. If, however, one issue dominates, then spread is minimal along the second dimension.
What we see is that almost all of politicians' voting behaviour in the US and Europe is explained by a single variable. Call that variable what you will, but they line up along with declared socioeconomic concerns. The occasional person / politician will have an issue where two groups from different parties will agree out of that main alignment (European "non-centrist" groups partnering up on national protections such as tariffs), but such items are usually overwhelmed by the single-axis lineup.
In the recent Australian context, such analysis doesn't work well, since we had two parties that were effective caucuses. Other two-party systems like the US aren't so disciplined, and Europe has plenty of multi-party legislatures, and their evidence is pretty strong.
Poole and Rosenthal's analyisis of US patterns are at:
http://voteview.com/
It's been a while since I looked at the European stuff, so I don't know where to find it off-hand