15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Gary Hollibaugh
Discussant/s:
Gary Hollibaugh
Meeting Room E

Eleanor Gao
When Do Elections Help Autocrats?: The Plight of Tribes under SNTV in Jordan

André Walter, Patrick Emmenegger
Designing Electoral Districts. How Electoral Geography and Partisan Politics Constrain Proportionality and Create Bias

Gary Hollibaugh, Jonathan Klingler, Adam Ramey
Under Pressure? Parties, Voters, and Legislator Ideology Reconsidered
Under Pressure? Parties, Voters, and Legislator Ideology Reconsidered
Gary Hollibaugh 3, Jonathan Klingler 2, Adam Ramey 1
1 New York University Abu Dhabi
2 University of Mississippi
3 University of Pittsburgh

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 come from roll call data (e.g., NOMINATE or ADA 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 robust evidence that legislators’ roll call records 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 NOMINATE scores (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997) closely mirror their own perceptions of themselves. Additionally, employing the Aldrich and McKelvey (1977) perceptual scaling algorithm, we demonstrate legislators’ sophistication in their ability to identify the ideology of important American political actors.