I'm working on a bunch of items for a chapter on the representational styles of Congressman Rehberg and Senator Tester. Here's a quick look at how they measure up ideologically compared to other senators and congressmen who have represented the state going back to the 1970s. The measure of ideology here is the Common Space score for the member, which is a measure of ideology calculated from congressional roll call data by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal. You can get details on the measurement at Professor Poole's website, VoteView. Common Space scores allow ideological comparisons across congressional chambers, which is why I use them and not the more common DW-NOMINATE scores. Negative scores are liberal, positive scores are conservative.
Interestingly, Rehberg is the most liberal of the Republicans who represented the state. And Jon Tester is fairly centrist. He's to the left of Senator Baucus, but nowhere near as liberal as Congressman Pat Williams or Senator John Melcher.
Just some food for thought on a Tuesday evening.
1 comment:
Just curious where Montana's most famous and powerful Senator, Mike Mansfield, would fall on your scale. I just saw his name on the tv crawl yesterday as it was announced that Caroline Kennedy has been or will soon be nominated as the next US Ambassador to Japan and the crawl also noted other high-profile people to hold that post, Mansfield among them.
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