How Purple Are We?

This time of year we hear a lot about swing states.  But every state is made up of both parties.  I thought it would be interesting to look at the distribution of legislators, partisan bills, and especially bipartisan bills.

Let’s start with the distribution of legislators.  You might expect the count of legislators to be somewhat related to the population of the state, much like the electoral college:

But in fact that is not the case.  Here is a heat map of the number of legislators by state:

It’s hard not to notice New England has a whole lot of legislators.  New Hampshire tips the scales at 424 (remember the entire US Congress has 535).  It’s less surprising that Nebraska has the least, as they are also the only unicameral state legislative body.

So now let’s look at how the states break down, comparing the number of Republicans to Democrats, in shades of purple:

A value of -1 would represent all Republicans, and +1 would represent all Democrats. In Nebraska all legislators are considered non-partisan, so they get a perfect 0.   No huge surprises here, really, although the swing states are perhaps not all as purple as you might expect.

However, compare the legislator breakdown to this map looking at what kind of bills are passed in each state.  I’m defining a partisan bill as one sponsored and cosponsored by only one party.  Again -1 would be all Republican bills, +1 all Democratic bills.

Personally I find this map, compared to the last one, fascinating.  Some states have a much more even bill distribution then the legislator breakdown would lead you to expect, like Kansas and New York.  Others are dominated by the majority party out of proportion to the legislator representation, like California and Missouri.  Which would imply to me that in some places the parties work more cooperatively then others.

So let’s take a different look at that same idea, and see where the most bipartisan bills are passed (bipartisan bills being bills with sponsors or cosponsors from both parties):

This map is colored by what percentage of passed bills are bipartisan.  Note: Nebraska is at 100% (and was perfectly balanced in the last map) because all legislators are non-partisan. And Idaho is a bit suspect because a large proportion of bills are sponsored by a committee, which I classified as bipartisan.  Otherwise, we do see that the states with the most bipartisan bills also have the most balance in partisan bills being passed (based on the previous map.)  The Great Plains stand out as exceptionally cooperative.

The last point I’d like to make is that, as in my last post, it’s really amazing how wildly different all of the states can be.  Undoubtedly lots of the differences highlighted in this post stem from the extreme procedural differences in the different legislatures.  And, as theorized in my last post, probably from cultural differences too.

Let me finish with a quick summary looking at the whole country, adding up numbers across all states:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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