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“The Most Liberal Senator”? Analyzing and Interpreting Congressional Roll Calls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

Joshua D. Clinton ,
Simon Jackman  and
Doug Rivers
Joshua D. Clinton
Affiliation:
Princeton University Assistant professor in the department of politics at Princeton University. He has recently authored articles on the analysis of roll call data in the American Journal of Political Science and Political Analysis.
Simon Jackman
Affiliation:
Stanford University Associate professor in the department of political science and, by courtesy, the department of statistics, and director of the Political Science Computational Laboratory. He has recently authored articles on the analysis of roll call data in the American Political Science Review and Political Analysis.
Doug Rivers
Affiliation:
Stanford University Professor in the department of political science, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and senior fellow, and research fellow, at the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society.
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Extract

Scoring lawmakers based upon the votes they cast while serving in Congress is both commonplace and politically consequential. However, scoring legislators' voting records is not without its problems—even when performed by organizations without a specific policy agenda. A telling illustration of the impact that these scores have on political debate recently arose in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries.

Type
Features
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 805 - 811
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

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