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Where Does the President Stand? Measuring Presidential Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Shawn Treier
Shawn Treier*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455
*
e-mail: satreier@umn.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

Although estimating the revealed preferences of members of Congress is straightforward, estimating the position of the president relative to Congress is not. Current estimates place the president as considerably more ideologically extreme than one would expect. These estimates, however, are very sensitive to the set of presidential positions used in the roll call analyses for the 103rd through 109th Congresses. The president often obtains more moderate ideal point estimates relative to Congress when including positions based on signing bills into law.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 124 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Author's note: I thank Tony Bertelli, Josh Clinton, Thomas Hammond, Michael Herron, David Nixon, Kevin Quinn, Jason Roberts, the participants of the University of Minnesota American Politics Proseminar, and several anonymous reviewers and the editors for their helpful feedback and suggestions. Initial research support provided by a Faculty Research Grant from the Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Georgia. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2007 and 2008 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the 2008 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

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