This Is What a Legislature with a Bunch of Libertarians Looks Like

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Ideal Points of NH State Legislators in 2 Dimensions (Click to Expand)

The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance does a Liberty Rating each year in which they analyze liberty-related roll-call votes of state representatives and senators and grade them. (The NHLA is a great government accountability organization, by the way, and well worth supporting; a lifetime membership is only $100.)

I used their roll-call votes for the 2014 N.H. House of Representatives but analyzed them differently (I also corrected three errors in their spreadsheet). The vast majority of roll-call votes are on economic issues, where conservative Republicans and libertarians line up. So the Liberty Rating might overstate how libertarian conservative House members really are, if those social issues that are voted on are disproportionately important. The Liberty Rating tries to assess how important each vote is, but the way they do it is arbitrary and subject to dispute (for instance, they rate a bill restricting the sharing of public school student information as highest-priority, on a level with legalizing marijuana and three times as important as a bill enacting occupational licensure of medical technicians). Furthermore, some of their bills are disputably freedom-related: they rated as negative a bill creating a new crime of “domestic violence.” Now, that bill might or might not have been a good idea, but it doesn’t seem like a liberty-related issue, unless you’re an anarchist who wants to legalize everything, including violence.

I used Item Response Theory in a Bayesian framework to estimate the ideal points of legislators in two dimensions. Let me unpack that statement for the layman. I let the data speak for itself. If legislators who generally voted libertarian voted in favor of a bill, the data are telling me that that bill is liberty-enhancing. If legislators who generally vote libertarian split on a bill, then maybe it’s not a liberty issue. Some votes might be “harder” or “easier” than others, like questions on a test. Even a pretty libertarian legislator might vote the wrong way on a hard vote, like a bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide (“Death with Dignity”, HB 1325 in 2014), which failed 219-66.

Using the R package “pscl,” I first hypothesized that all 93 roll-call votes in 2014 reflected a single ideological dimension: each legislator’s degree of libertarian-ness. We could line up all legislators’ ideal points in ideological space along a single line, and that line would be the best way to predict how all the legislators vote on any given issue.

That hypothesis ended up being wrong. On 84 roll-call votes, I couldn’t reject that hypothesis, but on 9, I could. Those were votes on which those voters who tended to vote in a libertarian direction on the other 84 votes tended to vote in an anti-libertarian direction instead – and conversely, those voters who usually voted anti-libertarian actually tended to vote libertarian on those 9 votes.

What were those 9 votes?

1. HB1237, prohibiting local sex-offender residency restrictions (passed 231-97)
2. HB1325, Death with Dignity (failed 66-219)
3. HB1501, mandating licensing of outpatient abortion facilities (killed 211-86) (the NHLA generally stays out of abortion bills, but they believed, and I agree, that business licensing is the wrong way for pro-lifers to restrict abortion)
4. HB1577, allowing alkaline hydrosis for the disposal of human remains (passed 209-116)
5. HB1624, modernizing the juvenile justice system (passed 256-40)
6. HB1625, decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana (passed 215-92)
7. HB249, mandating employer use of E-Verify (killed 266-68)
8. HB492, legalizing marijuana (passed 170-162)
9. SB296, discriminating in favor of veterans in public employment (killed 210-128)

What do all these issues have in common? They’re social issues on which libertarians make common cause with the left! And note that apart from Death with Dignity, libertarians won on every one of these bills. Part of that has to do with the fact that socially liberal Democrats were in the majority in 2014, and part of it has to do with the fact that libertarians are numerous enough in the House to swing some close votes, like the legalization of marijuana.

There were also a few votes without a clear libertarian position; in statistical jargon, they didn’t “load” onto the first ideological dimension at all:

1. SB318, establishing the crime of domestic violence (passed 325-3)
2. SB336, banning deer baiting on public land (killed 200-85)
3. SB366, establishing two casinos in New Hampshire (killed 173-172)

Arguably these roll-calls shouldn’t have been included in the Liberty Rating.

So I divided the roll-call votes into two groups: the 84 votes on which libertarians either voted with the right or lacked consensus and the 9 votes on which libertarians voted with the left. I ran separate Bayesian IRT analyses on these groups of roll-call votes, with the expected results. That procedure gave me two dimensions of ideology, allowing me to generate the scatter plot above.

When you click on the image to expand it, you’ll see legislators’ ideal points plotted in two dimensions: left-libertarian issues on the Y axis and right-libertarian issues on the X axis. The vast majority of legislators are found in two “clouds”: a conservative-Republican cloud in the bottom right and a progressive-Democrat cloud in the upper left. However, there is also a significant smattering of libertarians in the upper right quadrant. There is no corresponding set of communitarians in the bottom left, though there are a few legislators who are strikingly socially conservative given their modest economic conservatism (Democrat Roger Berube and Republican Regina Birdsell, for example).

The five legislators who are strongly libertarian on both dimensions are all Free State Project early movers. But if you draw an arc among points equidistant from the upper-right corner (an “iso-libertarian curve,” if you will) that just draws in John Burt, Richard Hinch, Todd Smith, Norman Major, Joel Winters, and Priscilla Lockwood, you enclose an envelope of legislators who really are strikingly socially libertarian given their degree of economic conservatism. Within that envelope, you’ll find 35 legislators, as good an estimate as we’re likely to have of the number of broadly libertarianish legislators in the 2014 House.

Now, left-libertarian issues all put together are probably not as important as right-libertarian issues all put together. Right-wingers are better, from a libertarian perspective, on the vast majority of economic issues and on about half of personal freedom issues (guns, tobacco, alcohol, and surprisingly, issues like privacy and police militarization). Indeed, the scatter plot above stretches the X axis to twice the length of the Y axis to accentuate this perspective. If all Republicans were like Priscilla Lockwood of Canterbury, the famed “New Hampshire Advantage” would not be long for this world.

Still, Priscilla Lockwood is the only Republican who can win in the highly Democratic town of Canterbury. Given that she is economically moderate and socially libertarian, she deserves support from groups like the NHLA. Heaven forfend she be replaced by an extreme economic leftist like Mary Gile of Concord.

Another question to consider: is there any other state legislative body in the country that would feature a pattern of roll-call votes similar to that found in New Hampshire, with a distinct, sizeable libertarian contingent? I’d venture not.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.