North Carolina General Assembly W Nominate Ideology Scores
The following links provide W-Nominate Ideology Scores for each individual member of the N.C. General Assembly in MS Excel format. A table of graphs and descriptive statistics is also provided. Scores for the 2009 Session of the N.C. General Assembly are currently being calculated and should be available soon!
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N.C. House and Senate W-Nominate Ideology Scores
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Descriptive Statstics and Graphs of N.C. General Assembly Ideology Scores
What are W-Nominate Scores and how are they different from interest group Scores?
The ideology (W-Nominate) scores presented on this page for the 1999-2007 sessions of the North Carolina General Assembly were created by Dr. Phillip Ardoin utilizing a scaling procedure developed by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. The Nominate scaling procedure is considered the most reliable and valid measure for quantifying legislator’s ideology. The procedure uses all non-unanimous votes and produces ideology scores which range from -1 to +1, with negative scores indicating more liberal legislators and positive scores indicating more conservative legislators. While scholars recognize that there may be multiple dimensions with regard to the ideological voting patterns of state legislators, Poole and Rosenthal argue a single ideological dimension explains on average 90% of the variation in roll-call voting within the U.S. Congress. Likewise, the results of my analysis indicate the single ideological dimension represented by the reported scores explain 89.6% of the variation in House roll-call votes and 93.5% of the variation in Senate roll-call votes for the N.C. General Assembly.
While numerous interest groups provide ideology ratings for state legislators, these scores are problematic for several reasons. Most notably, interest groups use only a limited number of votes deemed important to their agenda in creating ideology scores and rankings. These votes are usually key votes and are often close partisan votes which results in rankings which artificially inflate the level of partisanship and polarization within the legislature. Likewise, most interest groups only consider substantive votes while ignoring procedural votes and therefore disregard a large portion of the votes cast in the legislature. This challenges the validity of the interest group ideology scores because members may cast a substantive vote, in line with the preferences of the interest group, because of pressure within their district, but ultimately vote to kill the bill via a procedural vote.
Further questions regarding the N.C. General Assembly ideology data provided on this website should be directed to Phillip J. Ardoin (ardoinpj@appstate.edu). Any use of this data should reference Phillip J. Ardoin of the Department of Government and Justice Studies at Appalachian State University. Additional information regarding the Nominate scaling procedure is available on the Keith Poole’s website ( http://voteview.com/).