Comparing Presidents, Senators, and Justices: Interinstitutional Preference Estimation

A major challenge in testing spatial, interinstitutional models is placing different sets of actors on a common preference scale. We address this challenge by presenting a random effects, panel probit method which we use to estimate the ideal points of presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices on one scale. These estimates are comparable across time and institutions. We contrast our method with previously used methods and show that our method increases the ability to study interactions among different institutions.