Bailout Vote Analysis: Empirics

by David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran

A lot of numbers are being analyzed to understand the bailout vote yesterday. See for instance the NYT article (and great graphic) and the WaPo analysis of why the bill fell short.

We took legislators' left-right policy preferences as measured by their now-standard Nominate scores, the square of the Nominate score, and their degree of risk as measured by the Cook political report. We then estimated the probability of voting for the bailout as a function of these three variables and found all of them to be highly significant (details available on request).

The picture of the findings looks like this (click for a larger image):

From this we can make three observations:

1) There were partisan effects: Democrats were more likely to vote for the bailout than Republicans, all else equal. Even the most liberal Democrats from safe seats voted for the bill at about a 30% rate, while the most conservative Republicans voted at 10% or less.

2) The vote failed due to a defection from the wings; both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans voted against the bill. This is an unusual, but not unique, voting pattern -- we'll examine the reasons for it in our next post.

3) Electoral risk played a role; as members faced tougher challengers, their probability of voting for the bill fell. Going from a safe seat to one that leans your way, and then from leaning to toss-up, costs about 20% likelihood at each step.

This is all pretty straightforward, and runs with most of the conventional wisdom to date. What can be done to get those extra dozen or so members on board is less clear; we fear that the only realistic answers will either water the bill down significantly or make the vote much more partisan than it already is.

Comments

[Paul Lehto]

This appears to be very good work, much appreciated overall.

The nearly inevitable critique: While Democrats were "more likely" to support the bailout measure, the bipartisan coalition that emerged to defeat the bailout was, relatively speaking, more accurately described as "reasonably balanced" in party membership, since as you note, the wings of both parties DID combine to help defeat it.

Since you're sort of straying into the news business as a (reflective)"Pundit" -- the better lead on this particular narrow news-point is the existence of a robust bipartisan coalition. To say "more" democrats could mean almost anything from 1 to 100 or more.

The marginal extent in which one party votes for a bill more than another is true in virtually all cases, it's a relative yawner, and distracts from the lead here and what's unusual about the situation -- which you otherwise handle quite well.

[sbw]

Don't confuse correlation with causation.

I analyzed the data differently. I took who was associated with Pelosi in one way or another -- committee chair, subcommittee chair, friend, California cohort, Finance committee member.

A high percentage of them voted no. Just enough, in fact, to leave the vote in the awkward position that Barney Frank could mock rant.

This, of course, is why I got out of Political Science. Like your chart, Poli Sci deals with small-T truths.

Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to malice and stupidity.