A recurring them in political science is trying to understand how lawmakers vote. A popular one developed in 1998 by Keith Krehbiel is pivotal politics. Pivotal politics is usually presented as a line graph, but I wanted to see it as a 2d-plot, hence the “revisit”. This is also the first of a few posts on an analysis of a political economics paper, more on that soon!

For a variety of reasons, I’ve wanted to move away from using the Cook’s analysis, and do my own.

Imagine that high school graduation rates went from 75% to 80% in Obama’s presidency, how impressive is that? In particular, how would it compare to these changes:

Today, I learned that the Huffington Post allows one to download its data! Even better, someone wrote a library to do it for you!

The data for the targets come from the Cook Political Report. At some point I will get around to computing these myself. The delegate data is (so far) manually entered.