Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T08:42:44.153Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Where Does the President Stand? Measuring Presidential Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Shawn Treier*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455
*
e-mail: satreier@umn.edu (corresponding author)

Abstract

Although estimating the revealed preferences of members of Congress is straightforward, estimating the position of the president relative to Congress is not. Current estimates place the president as considerably more ideologically extreme than one would expect. These estimates, however, are very sensitive to the set of presidential positions used in the roll call analyses for the 103rd through 109th Congresses. The president often obtains more moderate ideal point estimates relative to Congress when including positions based on signing bills into law.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Author's note: I thank Tony Bertelli, Josh Clinton, Thomas Hammond, Michael Herron, David Nixon, Kevin Quinn, Jason Roberts, the participants of the University of Minnesota American Politics Proseminar, and several anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful feedback and suggestions. Initial research support provided by a Faculty Research Grant from the Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Georgia. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2007 and 2008 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the 2008 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

References

Brady, David W., and Volden, Craig. 1998. Revolving gridlock: Politics and policy from Carter to Clinton. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Clinton, Joshua D., Jackman, Simon, and Rivers, Douglas. 2004. The statistical analysis of legislative roll call data. American Political Science Review 98: 355–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Congressional Roll Call 1985. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.Google Scholar
Embretson, Susan E., and Reise, Steven P. 2000. Item response theory for psychologists. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hambleton, Ronald K., Swaminathan, H., and Jane Rogers, H. 1991. Fundamentals of item response theory. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Johnson, Valen E., and Albert, James H. 1999. Ordinal data modeling. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krehbiel, Keith. 1998. Pivotal politics: A theory of U.S. lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Andrew D., and Quinn, Kevin M. 2002. Dynamic ideal point estimation via Markov Chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999. Political Analysis 10: 134–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarty, Nolan, and Poole, Keith. 1995. Veto power and legislation: An empirical analysis of executive-legislative bargaining from 1961–1998. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 11: 282312.Google Scholar
McCarty, Nolan, and Razaghian, Rose. 1999. Advice and consent: Senate response to executive branch nominations, 1885–1996. American Journal of Political Science 43: 1122–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T. 2005. Spatial models of parliamentary voting. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1985. A spatial model for legislative roll call analysis. American Journal of Political Science 29: 357–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1991. Patterns of congressional voting. American Journal of Political Science 35: 228–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1997. Congress: A political-economic history of roll call voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Segal, Jeffrey. 1997. Separation-of-powers games in the positive theory of congress and courts. American Political Science Review 91 (March): 2844.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, James M. Jr. 1992. Artificial extremism in interest group ratings. Legislative Studies Quarterly 7: 319–45.Google Scholar