IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v78y1984i01p163-178_25.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Method of Estimating the Personal Ideology of Political Representatives

Author

Listed:
  • Carson, Richard T.
  • Oppenheimer, Joe A.

Abstract

We suggest a method for estimating a political representative's personal ideology and its effect on his or her voting decisions. The current practice of using the ratings of a pressure group such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) as a proxy for personal ideology is shown to have a number of theoretical and interpretive flaws. Our technique uses the residuals from two regression equations to provide answers to two questions: Is there a systematic ideological component to the voting behavior of political representatives after taking account of other political determinants, and if a systematic ideological component exists, is it possible to determine its role in voting on particular issues? The technique developed and the currently accepted practice are compared using votes on labor issues as an empirical example.

Suggested Citation

  • Carson, Richard T. & Oppenheimer, Joe A., 1984. "A Method of Estimating the Personal Ideology of Political Representatives," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 78(1), pages 163-178, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:78:y:1984:i:01:p:163-178_25
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400252490/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Potters, Jan & Sloof, Randolph, 1996. "Interest groups: A survey of empirical models that try to assess their influence," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 403-442, November.
    2. Allen Wilhite & John Theilmann, 1987. "Labor PAC contributions and labor legislation: A simultaneous logit approach," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 53(3), pages 267-276, January.
    3. B. Chupp, 2014. "Political interaction in the senate: estimating a political “spatial” weights matrix and an application to lobbying behavior," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 160(3), pages 521-538, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:78:y:1984:i:01:p:163-178_25. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.