Sacramento Quantified

So now that he suddenly seems to have a real shot at making it to the Senate, people are asking, "Is Scott Brown a liberal Republican or a conservative one?"  This political scientist at the University of Chicago has a common ideological index for all state legislatures and finds Brown to be almost a dead centrist.  (Sounds good to me.)

What's particularly interesting to me, though, is the degree of polarity he sees in California's legislature.  In one of his polimetric white papers, he finds California's legislature to be the most polarized, by far, of all the legislatures in the country, with the third-most liberal Democratic state delegation firmly in control of it.  The degree of polarization in Sacramento is probably at or near the root of the real governmental problems that ail our state so badly.