Estimating Constituency Ideology to Study Representation and Elections

• In Event: New Methodological Approaches in State Politics Research

Abstract

This paper develops a new method to estimate the ideology of legislators and their constituents (all constituents and the subset of voters) in all the American legislatures: Congress and the state legislatures. Medians as well as means are estimated for the subset of voters. Two types of ideology are estimated—one based on a 7-point liberalism-conservatism self-placement item, and the other on an IRT scale of a set of issue items. These items were asked in a national survey of legislators and they were asked of citizens in several CCES surveys. The estimated measures are equal or superior to existing benchmarks, where benchmarks exist. Some, eg, measures of district medians, fill gaps in existing measures. Differences among the measures contribute to the debate about the best way to measure ideology to test theories of representation and elections.

Author

• Lynda W. Powell, University of Rochester