https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvWJ8WwywEYadHVGMnR3Q1dld240QW1uOTU4d2h6enc
(spreadsheet is big, so give it a minute to load while you read the rest of this)
After the Arizona debate, in which Ron Paul backed up his assertion that Rick Santorum is a "fake conservative", and Rick retaliated by citing some study done by some organization saying Santorum was the most conservative candidate, I starting thinking that it might be interesting to try and find a non-partisan website that actually used some form of objective measures to determine the "conservativeness" of candidates.
After some googling, I found a site called VoteView, which originated at Carnegie Mellon's school of political science, migrated to UCLA's political science program, and then I believe eventually ended up at University of Georgia. What it attempts to do is to keep track of every congressman's roll call voting history for their entire career, and using that information and some complex statistical analysis, assign a numeric score for how "conservative" each congressperson is.
Since three of the current GOP candidates (Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum) were in Congress, this is actually really interesting info because it represents an objective way to call them out on their claims of being "the most conservative candidate"! I don't think the fact that Romney has no record really matters because nobody thinks of him as a conservative anyway.
Now the VoteView site just gives you access to the raw data, so I took this raw data, downloaded it into a Google Docs spreadsheet, reformatted it a bit to make it more usable by adding a filter, and then colored Gingrich yellow, Paul green and Santorum red so they stick out better as you scroll. With that said, this spreadsheet contains all congresses from 1937 through Jan 2011 so there are ALOT of names on there and it's hard to pick them out. You can use the filter to pull out just the candidate you're interested in if you don't like all the scrolling, but showing the distance between the candidates is actually pretty interesting too because there is a bigger gap than the numbers imply.
I'm definitely no expert on the measurements used by VoteView, but my understanding after looking at their website is that the first coordinate represents each candidates score on a continuum of "Conservative" to "Liberal". The second score is their score based on social issues. The continuum runs from -999 to +999, with -999 being liberal and +999 being conservative, so the higher the numeric score the more conservative the person.
In the end, what you get is:
Ron Paul - .7930, -0.257 (4th most conservative congressman since 1937)
Gingrich - .0369, -0.208 (446th since 1937)
Santorum - .3150, -0.304 (643rd since 1937)
As you can see, Santorum is nowhere NEAR more conservative than Ron Paul.
Anyway, not sure if this is any more than mental masturbation, but now if anyone says "Santorum is the most conservative" we can point to a non-partisan, quantitative, 3rd-party source that says "no he's not!".
(spreadsheet is big, so give it a minute to load while you read the rest of this)
After the Arizona debate, in which Ron Paul backed up his assertion that Rick Santorum is a "fake conservative", and Rick retaliated by citing some study done by some organization saying Santorum was the most conservative candidate, I starting thinking that it might be interesting to try and find a non-partisan website that actually used some form of objective measures to determine the "conservativeness" of candidates.
After some googling, I found a site called VoteView, which originated at Carnegie Mellon's school of political science, migrated to UCLA's political science program, and then I believe eventually ended up at University of Georgia. What it attempts to do is to keep track of every congressman's roll call voting history for their entire career, and using that information and some complex statistical analysis, assign a numeric score for how "conservative" each congressperson is.
Since three of the current GOP candidates (Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum) were in Congress, this is actually really interesting info because it represents an objective way to call them out on their claims of being "the most conservative candidate"! I don't think the fact that Romney has no record really matters because nobody thinks of him as a conservative anyway.
Now the VoteView site just gives you access to the raw data, so I took this raw data, downloaded it into a Google Docs spreadsheet, reformatted it a bit to make it more usable by adding a filter, and then colored Gingrich yellow, Paul green and Santorum red so they stick out better as you scroll. With that said, this spreadsheet contains all congresses from 1937 through Jan 2011 so there are ALOT of names on there and it's hard to pick them out. You can use the filter to pull out just the candidate you're interested in if you don't like all the scrolling, but showing the distance between the candidates is actually pretty interesting too because there is a bigger gap than the numbers imply.
I'm definitely no expert on the measurements used by VoteView, but my understanding after looking at their website is that the first coordinate represents each candidates score on a continuum of "Conservative" to "Liberal". The second score is their score based on social issues. The continuum runs from -999 to +999, with -999 being liberal and +999 being conservative, so the higher the numeric score the more conservative the person.
In the end, what you get is:
Ron Paul - .7930, -0.257 (4th most conservative congressman since 1937)
Gingrich - .0369, -0.208 (446th since 1937)
Santorum - .3150, -0.304 (643rd since 1937)
As you can see, Santorum is nowhere NEAR more conservative than Ron Paul.
Anyway, not sure if this is any more than mental masturbation, but now if anyone says "Santorum is the most conservative" we can point to a non-partisan, quantitative, 3rd-party source that says "no he's not!".
