MEASURING STATE POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

Abstract

The study of American politics at the state level has, in recent years, been held back by the lack of sufficient data to operationalize key concepts. In this article we assess survey, policy, and roll-call measures that may be used to operationalize one such concept, state political ideology. Each of these measures performed well on reliability and validity tests. However, on balance the roll-call measures performed best on these tests, and scored highest in terms of practicality and ease of use. This leads us to recommend the roll-call measures of state political ideology as the best alternative at this time. We do, however, emphasize that all the measures tested here performed reasonably well, and that they should be used when theoretical concerns so dictate.

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