John P. McIver

Measuring State Partisanship and Ideology with Survey Data

The study of state politics has suffered because of the lack of good data on major political orientations at the state level. This paper briefly discusses this problem and the need for survey-based measures, and then presents sets of estimates of state partisanship and ideology. These are derived from aggregating CBS News-New York Times polls at the state level. Using fifty-one polls taken from 1974 through 1982, our estimates are based on over 76,000 respondents. The estimates are shown to have good overall validity and reliability, and should prove valuable in studies of comparative state elections and policymaking.

Public Opinion and Policy Liberalism in the American States

This paper examines the effect of public opinion on public policy in the American states. We use a new measure of state public opinion, liberal-conservative ideological identification of state electorates, derived from aggregating CBS News/New York Times national opinion surveys. Regression and LISREL are used in the analysis to demonstrate that state opinion is a major determinant of state policy. Citizen preferences are markedly more important than state social and economic characteristics in accounting for patterns of policy liberalism in the states. These results constitute a major challenge to economic development as an explanation of state policy. Unless mass views have some place in the shaping of policy, all the talk about democracy is nonsense. -V. 0. Key (1961, p. 7) Popular control of public policy is a central tenet of democratic theory. Indeed, we often gauge the quality of democratic government by the responsiveness of public policymakers to the preferences of the mass public as well as by formal opportunities for, and the practice of, mass participation in political life. The potential mechanisms of democratic popular control can be stated briefly. In elections, citizens have the opportunity to choose from leaders who offer differing futures for government action. Once elected, political leaders have incentives to be responsive to public preferences. Elected politicians who offer policies that prove unpopular or unpleasant in their consequences can be replaced at the next election by other politicians who offer something different. Of course, this picture describes only the democratic ideal. A cynic would describe the electoral process quite differently: Election campaigns

Measuring the Public's Ideological Preferences in the 50 States: Survey Responses Versus Roll Call Data

for some time now, our team has reported states ideological preferences as the mean ideological selfidentification of respondents in CBS News/New York Times polls (Wright, Erikson, and Mclver 1985; Erikson, Wright, and Mclver 1993). l Recently, Brace et al. (2002, 2004) have reported measuring state ideological self-identification using data from the American National Election Studies (NES) and the General Social Survey (GSS) surveys.2 Using these two independent datasets, both teams of researchers have concluded that aggregated state-level ideological preferences are overwhelmingly stable over time, at least in recent decades. Theory does not demand that ideology be constant. In fact, we know that ideologys sister variable, state-level party identification, does vary over time both in absolute and relative terms (Erikson, Wright, and Mclver 2006).3 But there can be little doubt that when measuring state ideological preferences as the mean self-report of citizen preferences, the absolute and relative positions of the states have been very stable from year to year, going back at least to the mid-1970s. Contrary to this overwhelming evidence from surveys, Berry et al. (2007) insist that state-level ideological preferences are actually fluid, with states frequently shifting back and forth between liberal and conservative. Their argument relies on their index of citizen ideology (Berry et al. 1998), which they find superior to measuring ideological preferences directly from public opinion polls. Unlike ideological identification in polls, their citizen ideology scores change over time. This distinction is crucial for them because they argue that state ideology could causally influence other state-level variables only by changing from year to year and that it could not do so if it is static. Berry et al. imagine that, for example, residents of a state might hold

The impact of scale length on reliability and validity

The conventional wisdom in political science seems to hold that simply increasing the length of scales automatically increases their reliability and that validity supposedly increases merely as the result of increased reliability. This paper shows analytically and by way of example that—despite their status as conventional wisdom—neither of these statements is true without qualifiers that seem to be unrecognized. The paper thus clarifies the relationships among scale length, reliability, and validity.