Revised 18 November 2016
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ANNOUNCEMENT — Jeff Lewis of UCLA will be taking over the 34 year long NOMINATE project from Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal effective at the end of this year. At that time this Blog and voteview.com will go to a new website at UCLA that will also incorporate the old Voteview-For-Windows Software. The k7moa.com website will be up until early 2018 to archive all of the data and unpublished papers/Monte Carlo studies done by Poole and Rosenthal in the past 34 years. We will post a notice on the PolMeth mail server as well as other outlets announcing the exact timing of the switch over. Poole and Rosenthal will be happy to answer questions but inquiries as of 2017 should be directed to Jeff Lewis and his outstanding group of programmers.
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The 114^th Congress will pass into history in two months. Before it does there will be a lame duck session that, with Hillary Clinton’s almost certain victory [WHOA — Did we call that one wrong!!!] and Republican losses in both chambers, will likely wrap up in a matter of weeks. The small number of roll calls will not change the figures below that much.

Below we show the polarization series for the House and Senate using the Weekly CS DW-NOMINATE scores. The impact of the last three elections — 2010, 2012, and 2014 — on the Republican Party seems to have been the large influx of “Ted Cruz” Republicans. Polarization has jumped sharply from the first two years of President Obama’s first term. Polarization in the House may have leveled off (see below) but the Senate increase is much larger than the House.

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The figures below show the means of the two parties in each Chamber on both dimensions over time. The House Republicans actually moderated very slightly in the 114^th while the House Democrats show absolutely no difference between North and South and the two have converged. The slight uptick in polarization in the House is due to the leftward movement of the Democrats being slightly greater than the leftward movement of the Republicans.

The Senate for the most part tracks the House on the first dimension. The main difference is that there are still three Senators from the South (the eleven states of the Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma [CQ’s definition]). Those three [Nelson (D-FL), Kaine (D-VA) [who will be Vice President in January], and Warner (D-VA)] are more moderate than their Northern counterparts. Nonetheless, the Senate Democrats are moving to the left and the Senate Republicans are moving to the right thereby increasing polarization in the Senate at a faster rate than in the House.

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The Second Dimension at one time picked up conflict over Civil Rights for African Americans but, beginning in the early 1970s until the early 2000s “Social Issues” such as abortion and gun control (see Poole and Rosenthal, 1997; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, February 2016). The Second Dimension has faded to insignificance but could make a come back with a possible split in the Republican Party during the 2016 elections.

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