The Liberal-Conservative Ideology of U.S. Senators: A New Measure

Responding to widespread concerns about how scholars typically measure legislators' ideologies, we propose, implement, and test the efficacy of a novel measurement approach. We employ formal content analysis of the news coverage of U.S. Senators' initial campaigns for office to create an ideology scale for members of the 101st Congress. We also offer systematic tests of reliability and of convergent and discriminant construct validity for this scale and for conventional, indirect measures of Senator ideology using interest group ratings and residualized analyses measures. This newspaper content analysis procedure produces ideology scores that demonstrate high reliability and validity and that are superior for theory-testing purposes to commonly used surrogate or indirect measures of legislator ideology.