Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal

Abstract

Berry et al.'s (1998) measures of U.S. state citizen and government ideology rely on unadjusted interest-group ratings for a state's members of Congress to infer information about (1) the ideological orientation of the electorates that selected them or (2) state legislators and the governor from the same state. Potential weaknesses in unadjusted interest-group ratings prompt the question: Are the Berry et al. measures flawed, and if so, can they be fixed by substituting alternative measures of a member's ideology? We conclude that a version of the Berry et al. state government ideology indicator relying on NOMINATE common space scores is marginally superior to the extant version. In contrast, we reaffirm the validity of the original state citizen ideology indicator and find that versions based on NOMINATE common space scores and adjusted ADA and COPE scores introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder (1999) are weaker. berry et al. (hereafter "BRFH") (1998) offer two measures of ideology in the American states, observed annually for years after 1959. 1 Their indicator of citizen ideology measures the average location of the active electorate in each state on a liberal-conservative continuum. Their government ideology indicator measures the average location of the elected officials in each state on the same continuum. The underlying continuum for both indicators is conceived as operational ideology (or policy mood)-the kinds of policies preferred-rather than self-identification (or symbolic ideology) Stimson 1991). These ideology indicators have proven useful in analyzing the impact of public opinion or the policy preferences of elected officials on a wide variety of state policy outputs, including welfare reform at UNIV OF GEORGIA LIBRARIES on June 9, 2015 spa.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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