Dynamic Ideal Points for Voters, Elected Officials, and More (2009–2016)

In my 2016 JOP article, I introduced a new technique for quickly and easily estimating common-space ideal point estimates of American political actors. The estimation procedure re-configures the seminal Aldrich-McKelvey algorithm to take respondents’ ideological placements of themselves and other political actors and place these on a common scale, accounting for varied response-style heterogeneity across respondents.

I have pooled together CCES data from 2009–2016 and used the method described in the paper to generate common-space estimates for the following political actors by year:

  • Voters (mean voter at the national, state, and congressional district level)

  • House incumbents and challengers

  • Senate incumbents and challengers

  • Incumbent governors

  • The Supreme Court

  • The President

  • Major party presidential candidates (Romney, Cruz, Paul, Bush, Clinton, Trump)

The estimates correlate highly with NOMINATE scores for members of Congress, and with Tausanovitch and Warshaw’s estimates for state- and district-level voter means.

The first release of the data is available here.

Please note: due to court-ordered redistricting, several Florida districts were reshuffled ahead of the 2016 elections, causing some CCES labeling issues for that state and year — House incumbent/challenger names may not be correctly matched for that pairing. This does not affect other states or races.

The data format is RDS and can be accessed via the readRDS function in R. The object is called the_estimates, with the following columns:

  • Year — integer, 2009–2016

  • State — state name (for state/district-level actors) or “Natl” for national-level actors

  • Dist — House district, if applicable

  • Voter — mean voter at national, state, or district level

  • ideals — the scaled ideal point for the political actor

  • who — identifies the actor (president, presidential candidate, Supreme Court, governor, House/Senate incumbent or challenger); House/Senate values conform to CCES naming (e.g., HouC1 = House Candidate 1)

  • FullName — CCES’s reported full name of the actor

  • icpsr — ICPSR identifier for House and Senate members, for matching with NOMINATE, DIME, or similar databases

Citation:

Ramey, Adam. 2016. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Crowdsourced Ideal Point Estimation.” Journal of Politics 78(1), 281–295.

Feel free to email me with any questions.