Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/256968 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Citation: 
[Journal:] Economies [ISSN:] 2227-7099 [Volume:] 7 [Issue:] 2 [Article No.:] 36 [Publisher:] MDPI [Place:] Basel [Year:] 2019 [Pages:] 1-19
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
This study extends the political science and political psychology literature on the political ideology of lawmakers by addressing the following question: How stable is a legislator's political ideology over time? In doing so, we employ Nokken-Poole scores of legislators' political ideology for members of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate who were elected prior to the 103rd Congress that began in early 1991 and who served consecutively through the 115th Congress, which ended in early 2019. Results from individual time-series estimations suggest that political ideology is unstable over time for a sizable portion of the members of both major political parties who serve in the U.S. Congress, while analysis of the pooled data suggests that, after accounting for inertia in political ideology and individual legislator effects, Republican legislators become more conservative over time. These results run somewhat counter to the finding in prior studies that the political ideologies of lawmakers and other political elites are stable over time.
Subjects: 
political ideology
roll-call voting
public choice
public policy
United States Congress
JEL: 
D70
D72
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.