What makes a congressman valuable to his party? One fairly intuitive answer is that it's someone who votes with his party on key pieces of legislation more often than a typical congressman from his district would.
Nate Silver, well known for his astute statistical analysis... No, let me start that again. Nate Silver, who manages to take statistics and turn them into something more meaningful than we could have hoped for, has done an analytical job which should re-educate all of us, particularly those among us who have become blindly cynical about Congress.
He's written a classy piece of analysis showing that our representatives are doing a far more valuable (or lousy) job than most of us bother to notice.
Silver peels back Democratic members' votes to their first causes and demonstrates their loyalty/value (or absence of loyalty/value) to their party.
What I then did was to run a logistic regression for each vote, comparing each representative's vote to his predicted vote based on his district's PVI. For example, a congressman in a district with a PVI of R+6 had a .37 likelihood (37% chance) of voting for the stimulus package. A congressman from such a district who voted for the stimulus package would be rated positively for his vote: specifically he'd receive a score of 1 less .37, or +.63. If the congressman voted against the stimulus package, on the other hand, he'd receive a score of -.37. I then added up each representative's score across all 10 votes.
Don't break into a sweat! Silver gives us charts and meaningful interpretations, too.
It's not proper, for instance, to compare Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, the moderate congresswoman from South Dakota, to a typical Democrat, or even a typical Democrat in a conservative district, because if she were to retire, we can't take for granted that a Democrat would replace her. In fact, in South Dakota, she would probably be replaced by a Republican. Is Herseth-Sandlin -- even though she breaks with her party somewhat frequently -- more valuable to the Democrats than a typical congressman from South Dakota would be? That's what we're trying to get at.
Okay, it looks kind of nerdy. But this is nerdiness we need more of. We tend to get a superficial idea of our representation and then run with it, even when the facts tell us we're being to hasty in our judgments. Don't lump all "Blue Dogs" together and then dump on them.
Although 12 of the 25 most valuable Democrats are Blue Dogs, so are 8 of the 21 least valuable ones. It's short-sighted to lump the Blue Dogs together; they disagree on as much as they agree, and although some of them are among the most counterproductive Democrats, others are among the most worthwhile.
