Adam R Brown

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  • Winter 2019
  • Poli 397 and 399r: Utah Legislature Internship
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  • Utah Legislature internship (all majors)
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  • Book: Utah Politics and Government
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Ideology scores for the Utah House of Representatives, 2017

Political scientists have developed advanced algorithms that can calculate each legislator's ideology score based on his or her legislative voting record, called a NOMINATE score (it's an acronym, hence the caps). Usually these scores are used to study Congress. They are difficult and time-consuming to calculate, so they are not available for most states. As part of my research, I calculated scores for Utah legislators. Important caveats:

1. Ideology scores have no scale. There is not a number that means "liberal." Scores only have relative meaning. A lower score is more liberal than a higher score.
2. Scores are only comparable within a single chamber, within a single year. You cannot compare House scores to Senate scores, and you cannot compare 2010 scores to 2011 scores. (That's because of caveat #1: Scores have no scale.)
3. Zero does not mean "moderate," it just means "the middle of this group of legislators." Since Utah's legislature is very conservative, the most moderate Utah legislators would seem very conservative on a national scale. Even scores below 0 probably indicate a pretty conservative legislator in these scores.

You can find a thorough discussion of these ideology scores at the Utah data points blog.

The scores below are for 2017 in the Utah House of Representatives. Select a different year here:
House: - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 - 2010 - 2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018
Senate: - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 - 2010 - 2011 - 2012 - 2013 - 2014 - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018

Distribution of scores

The plot below summarizes how many legislators fall into each score range. There is one "D" for each Democrat in the given range, and one "R" for each Republican. There are 75 legislators in the Utah House of Representatives.

 -100 to -90 | DDDDDDD
-90.1 to -80 | DD
-80.1 to -70 | DDD
-70.1 to -60 | 
-60.1 to -50 | 
-50.1 to -40 | D
-40.1 to -30 | 
-30.1 to -20 | 
-20.1 to -10 | 
  -10.1 to 0 | 
   0.1 to 10 | RR
  10.1 to 20 | RRRR
  20.1 to 30 | RRRRRRRRR
  30.1 to 40 | RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
  40.1 to 50 | RRRRRRRRRRR
  50.1 to 60 | RRRRRRRRRR
  60.1 to 70 | RRRRR
  70.1 to 80 | RRR
  80.1 to 90 | RRR
 90.1 to 100 | 

Detailed ideology data

If you use this data in published work, please credit me appropriately.

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