Content provided in partnership with
Business Services Industry
The political implications of state political ideology: a measure tested
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 1997 by Marshall H. Medoff
I
Introduction
The issue of ideology has received considerable attention in the literature. Almost all of the focus is on the ideology of legislators (e.g., U.S. senators or congressional representatives). Little attention centers on a state's political ideology (SPI). The ability to measure, as accurately as possible, a state's political ideology is crucial in many analyses conducted at the state level.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Typically most legislative studies measure SPI as the percentage of a state's vote for a particular ideological presidential candidate (e.g., McGovern in 1972, Reagan in 1980, Mondale in 1984, or Dukakis in 1988). However, presidential votes measure considerably more than just ideology. Presidential votes reflect a wide variety of factors such as incumbency, state of the economy, campaign messages (positive or negative), personality of the candidates, etc. It should be apparent that if in empirical studies, SPI is measured inaccurately, the consequence will be a measurement error.
This paper empirically estimates the political ideology of each of the 50 states. The paper is organized in the following manner. The theoretical framework and model are presented in the following section. In the third section four different state ideology measures are estimated and the 50 states are ranked according to their ideology scores. In section four each of the four state ideology measures are evaluated on the basis of their reliability and predictive power. The fifth section presents the political and policy implications of the state ideology scores. The summary appears in the final section.
Theoretical Framework
Political ideology is one of the most frequently used concepts in the social sciences, yet has a variety of meanings. Downs (1957) defines political ideology as a platform or set of positions on issues that individuals adopt in seeking political office. Converse (1964) argues that a political ideology is a belief system; a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some constraint. Bluhm (1974) contends that political ideology is a philosophy about the goals of public policy and the means by which these policies are implemented. Jackson and Kingdon (1992) assert that political ideology is a set of core beliefs that organize perceptions of political issues and that underlie individual preferences. Kalt and Zupan (1984) suggest that a political ideology is a statement about how government can best serve their proponents' conceptions of the public interest.
Ideology is of course a theoretical construct. It only becomes meaningful when it is given an operational definition. For the purposes of this paper political ideology links beliefs about facts or values and attitudes about issues, positions, policies, and actions. A state's political ideology is defined as the aggregation of the ideological preferences of a state's voting population on a wide variety of issues (political, social, foreign, economic). These ideological preferences are summarized along a conservative-liberal continuum by a single number.
Estimating a state's political ideology assumes that (1) a constituent ideology exists; (2) a legislator knows what it is; and (3) the ideology of the constituency can be inferred from the votes of their representatives. As Higgs (1989) notes all contributions to the literature either explicitly or implicitly make these three assumptions; otherwise their studies would be meaningless (e.g., both the seminal works by Kau and Rubin (1979) and Kalt and Zupan (1984) assume representatives accurately reflect the ideological views of their constituents). Further, it is a fundamental tenet of a representative democracy that ideological driven votes by representatives stem from the ideological preferences of the electorate.(1)
To estimate a state's political ideology from the votes of its representatives the functional form of the typical voting study is used:
[R.sub.i] = a + b[X.sub.i] + c[I.sub.i] [1]
where [R.sub.i] is an ideological interest group rating of the voting record of legislator i, [X.sub.i] is a vector of economic interests of the constituency of legislator i, and [I.sub.i] is the ideology of the legislator's geographic constituency. The variable [I.sub.i] is not directly observable and consequently it must be derived indirectly. This is accomplished by separating the ideological rating variable [R.sub.i] into a predicted constituent economic interest component and a residual component. The residual measures the geographical constituency's ideology.(2)
The dependent variable in equation (1), a legislator's ideology rating [R.sub.i], is measured by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) 1993 rating of each member of the House of Representatives. This liberal interest group rating is the percentage of a representative's vote on a variety of issues (e.g., social, fiscal, defense, foreign policy) that agrees with the ADA's positions.(3) The ADA rating emphasizes votes on social and domestic policy issues such as Family and Medical Leave, Gun Control, Abortion, Homosexual Rights, Free Trade, Missile Defense Spending, and Striker Replacement. The reason is that social issues tend to be ideologically revealing litmus tests not easily influenced by logrolling or party conformity since opinion tends to be bimodal and not readily resolved through consensus politics. The ADA ideological rating ranges from 0 (extremely conservative) to 100 (extremely liberal). We use a representative's, rather than a senator's, ideology rating. Representatives are more likely to accurately reflect their constituents' ideology because their term of office is shorter and voters judge them on a relatively limited number of votes.(4) The independent variables in equation (1) will depend on the assumptions made about a congressional representative's voting behavior.
