This week I want to talk about legislative rankings. In recent years, after each legislative session has concluded, The Salt Lake Tribune releases a scorecard ranking state legislators on how conservative or liberal they are. These rankings are based on a composite of other measurements established by several special interest groups, such as the Sierra Club, Parents for Choice in Education, the Utah Education Association, and the Utah Taxpayers Association.
But perhaps there’s a better way to determine who in our state legislature is really conservative or liberal? A professor down at Brigham Young University thinks there is a better way.
Adam Brown, an assistant professor of political science at BYU, notes that the Tribune’s scorecard is handicapped by its limited coverage of legislative votes. The special interest scores used to comprise the Tribune’s accounting only covers certain votes particular to that special interest’s concerns. For instance, the Sierra Club only measures environmental votes and the UEA only education-related votes.
Professor Brown created a new scorecard based on all legislative votes – not that there’s much difference between his and the Tribune’s, but there are some nuances that differ.
In the 2011 Tribune scorecard, Representative Carl Wimmer comes out on top of the conservative legislators as he does in Professor Brown’s test. Likewise, Representative Rebecca Chavez-Houck is rated by the Tribune as the House’s most liberal member and Professor Brown concurs. The Tribune follows Representative Wimmer with John Dougall and Keith Grover, respectively. Professor Brown differs with John Dougall and Ken Sumsion in the 2nd and 3rd slots.
If you’re interested, there’s a methodology used by Professor Brown called NOMINATE, which is an acronym for some entirely wonky academic construct that only very intellectually-isolated professors could dream of. As example, by way of explanation, Professor Brown writes, “There is more than one version of the NOMINATE algorithm (we use W-NOMINATE)….” And then my head exploded.
What’s important to note about Professor Brown’s scorecard of legislators is that his scores are only comparable within a single chamber for a single year – meaning he compares apples to apples. He points out that his scores have no intrinsic meaning; that is, his scores should not be taken as definitively conservative or liberal; his scores are only comparative along a spectrum of legislative votes. Lastly, he adds that on a scale of -100 being liberal to +100 being conservative a score of 0, right in the middle, doesn’t necessarily mean a legislator is ideally moderate. It just means that compared to his or her colleagues a legislator with a 0 ranking is at the mean between liberal and conservative.
So, now that I have you totally confused, let me read to you Professor Brown’s top five liberals and conservatives in the House and Senate chambers of the Utah State Legislature.
The top five liberals in the House of Representatives are: Rebecca Chavez-Houck, Joel Briscoe, Jackie Biskupski, Patrice Arent, and Brian King – all Democrats. The top five liberals in the Senate are: Ross Romero, Luz Robles, Ben McAdams, Pat Jones, and Karen Morgan – again, all Democrats.
The top five conservatives in the House of Representatives are: Carl Wimmer, John Dougall, Ken Sumsion, Mike Morely, and Merlynn Newbold – not surprisingly, all Republicans. The top five conservatives in the Senate are: Scott Jenkins, Margaret Dayton, Chris Buttars, Howard Stephenson, and Mark Madsen – again, all Republicans.
In the battle of House Speakers – the former Speaker Dave Clark versus the current Speaker Becky Lockhart – the Tribune ranked Dave Clark as 4th most conservative with Speaker Lockhart at number 27. Professor Brown, on the other hand, has Dave Clark at number 15 and Speaker Lockhart at number 13 when all votes are considered.
If you’re interested in looking at all of the scores you can visit Professor Brown’s work at Utahdatapoints.com. (http://utahdatapoints.com/2011/05/who-is-really-the-most-conservative-utah-legislator/)
