Still the Same? Revealed Preferences and Ideological Self-Perception Among Former Members of Congress

• Author: Adam J. Ramey,Jonathan D. Klingler,Gary E. Hollibaugh
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221106425
• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Date: 01 November 2022

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(6) 781–791

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221106425

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Still the Same? Revealed Preferences and

Ideological Self-Perception Among Former

Members of Congress

Adam J. Ramey

1

, Jonathan D. Klingler

2

, and Gary E. Hollibaugh, Jr

3



Abstract

For years, countless scholars have posited the role of constituency and party pressure on legislators’roll call voting records.

Indeed, though popular estimates of legislators’preferences often come from roll call data (e.g., DW-NOMINATE scores), most

scholars are careful to note that these are not necessarily measures of ideology per se but rather of legislators’revealed

preferences—that is, they reflect both legislators’ideological commitments as well as the influence of party and constituency. In

this paper, we offer fairly robust evidence that existing measures of legislator behavior may be closer to their preferences than

once thought. Using a novel survey of former members of the House of Representatives, we leverage the severing of the

electoral connection and lack of institutional party pressure to show that legislators’preferences as measured by existing

methods closely mirror their own perceptions of themselves.

Keywords

congress, ideology, ideal points, elite surveys

Introduction

Measuring elite ideology is a fundamentally difficult

practice, yet is key to much modern political science re-

search on political institutions. In practice, at least within the

context of the United States Congress, doing so typically

relies on third-party observations from constituents (Aldrich

& McKelvey, 1977;Hollibaugh et al., 2013;Ramey, 2016)

or experts (Joesten & Stone, 2014;Maestas et al., 2014),

campaign finance records (Bonica, 2013,2018,2019), as-

sumptions about preferences based on observed behavior

such as voting (Poole & Rosenthal, 1997), cosponsorship

(Alem´

an et al., 2009), or other indirect methods. In contrast,

direct surveys of members of Congress are exceedingly rare,

though one exception is the Political Courage Test (formerly

the National Political Awareness Test [NPAT]) distributed

by Vote Smart (formerly Project Vote Smart), which asks

candidates to rate their positions on a host of ideological

issues (Ansolabehere et al., 2001); however, in surveying

candidates for office, such measures are potentially prone to

social desirabiltiy bias or selective responsiveness from

those seeking to downplay controversial views.

Regardless of the source, when constructing ideological

measures, scholars must contend with numerous factors af-

fecting their reliability, including differential item response on

surveys (Aldrich & McKelvey,1977), the difficulty of using roll

calls when the legislative agenda is subject to strong control

(Clinton & Meirowitz, 2001), committee gatekeeping (Snyder,

1992), the distorting effects of press releases and legislators’

public behavior (Grimmer, et al., 2014), and general uncertainty

(and incorrect assumptions) about the underlying data-

generating process (Desposato et al., 2011).

Additionally, the resulting measurements—however they

might be generated—are often criticized by scholars and public

intellectuals. For example, during the 2004 presidential election,

the National Journal rated Democratic candidate John Kerry as

the “most liberal”senator in 2003 based on their analysis of 62

key votes. However, as Clinton and Jackman (2004) noted, this

was largely because Kerry’s campaign took him away from the

Senate for all but the most consequential votes, thus making him

appear far more liberal than he might have otherwise appeared

had he been present for all votes. Another recent ex ample is

DW-NOMINATE’s placement of the “Squad”(four relatively

young Democratic congresswomen of color—Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota,

1

Political Science, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

2

Department of Political Science, University of Mississippi, University, MS,

USA

3

Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh,

Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gary E. Hollibaugh, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs,

University of Pittsburgh, 230 South Bouquet Street, 3802 Wesley W,

Posvar Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.

Email: gary.hollibaugh@pitt.edu