The political implications of state political ideology: a measure tested

I

Introduction

The issue of ideology has received considerable attention in the literature. Almost all of the focus is forward the ideology of legislators (eg U senators or congressional representatives). Little attention center forward a state's political ideology (SPI). The ability to measure, as accurately as possible, a state's political ideology is crucial in many analyses carriageed at the state level.

Typically greatest in number legislative studies measure SPI as the percentage of a state's promised for a particular ideological presidential candidate (eg McGovern in 1972 Reagan in 1980 Mondale in 1984 or Dukakis in 1988) However, presidential consecrated by a vows measure considerably more than just ideology. Presidential suffrages reflect a wide variety of factors like 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 consecution 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 standard 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 forward the basis of their reliability and predictive power. The fifth section quick in emergenciess the political and policy implications of the state ideology scores. The summary appears in the final section.

Theoretical Framework

Political ideology is single in kind of the most frequently used general [i]or[/i] abstract notions in the social sciences, further has a variety of meanings. Downs (1957) defines political ideology as a platform or wager of positions on issues that individuals adopt in seeking political office. chat (1964) argues that a political ideology is a belief system; a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the simple bodys are bound together by about constraint. Bluhm (1974) contends that political ideology is a philosophy about the goals of public policy and the means from which these policies are implemented. Jackson and Kingdon (1992) assert that political ideology is a settle of core beliefs that organize perceptions of political issues and that underlie individual choices Kalt and Zupan (1984) hint that a political ideology is a statement about for what reason government can best serve their proponents' conceptions of the public interest.

Ideology is of course a theoretical fabricate It only becomes meaningful when it is given an operational definition. For the designs 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 choices of a state's voting population forward a wide variety of issues (political, social, foreign, economic). These ideological estimations are summarized along a conservative-liberal continuum by means of 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 voices 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 (eg as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but the seminal works by Kau and Rubin (1979) and Kalt and Zupan (1984) assume representatives accurately mirror the ideological views of their constituents). Further, it is a fundamental notion of a representative democracy that ideological driven devoteds by representatives stem from the ideological selections of the electorate.(1)

To estimate a state's political ideology from the voices of its representatives the functional form of the typical voting cogitation is used:

[R.sub.i] = a + b[X.sub.i] + c[I.sub.i] [1]

where [R.sub.i] is an ideological interest assemblage 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 at separating the ideological rating variable [R.sub.i] into a predicted constituent economic interest constituent and a residual component. The residual measures the geographical constituency's ideology.(2)

The hanging variable in equation (1), a legislator's ideology rating [R.sub.i], is measured by dint of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) 1993 rating of each member of the House of Representatives. This liberal interest collection rating is the percentage of a representative's consecrated by a vow on a variety of issues (eg social, fiscal, defense foreign policy) that agrees with the ADA's positions.(3) The ADA rating emphasizes ballots on social and domestic policy issues like as Family and Medical Leave, fire-arm Control, Abortion, Homosexual Rights, exempt Trade, Missile Defense Spending, and Striker Replacement. The reason is that social issues attend to be ideologically revealing litmus touchstones not easily influenced by logrolling or party conformity since opinion wait ons to be bimodal and not readily resolv by means of 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 deliberate their constituents' ideology because their time of office is shorter and voter referee them on a relatively limited number of votes(4) The independent variables in equation (1) will hang on the assumptions made about a congressional representative's voting behavior.