lowerCombined {krige}

State Legislative District (Lower Chambers) Public Opinion Ideology in 2010

Description

These data present measures of ideology in 2010 for the districts for lower chambers of state legislatures, recorded as the variable krige.lower. 49 states' chambers are covered–the Nebraska Unicameral is omitted here to be included in the file upperCombined. Forecasts are based on a kriging model fitted over the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES), paired with predictive data from the 2010 Census. Each district's public ideology is paired with a measure of the ideology of the State House member (or members) from the district (update from Shor and McCarty 2011).

Format

The lowerCombined dataset has 5446 observations and 10 variables.

st

Two-letter postal abbreviation for the state.

lower

The state legislative district number (lower chamber).

STATEA

The FIPS code for the state.

krige.lower

The ideology of the average citizen in the district.

lowerKluge

Combined index of STATEA followed by lower.

krige.lower.var

The variance of ideology among the district's citizens.

name

Last name of the state legislator, followed by first name and middle initial.

party

Political party of the legislator. D=Democrat, R=Republican, X=Other.

st_id

Temporary identifer variable. DO NOT USE.

np_score

Ideology score for the state legislator (lower chamber). Higher values are usually interpreted as more right-wing, with lower values as more left-wing.

Source

Ansolabehere, Stephen. 2011. "CCES, Common Content, 2008." Ver. 4.

Minnesota Population Center. 2011. National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. ‘⁠https://www.nhgis.org⁠’

Shor, Boris and Nolan M. McCarty. 2011. "The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures." American Political Science Review 105(3):530-551.

References

Jeff Gill. 2020. Measuring Constituency Ideology Using Bayesian Universal Kriging. State Politics & Policy Quarterly. doi:10.1177/1532440020930197

Examples

# Descriptive Statistics
summary(lowerCombined)

# Correlate Senators' DW-NOMINATE Scores with Public Opinion Ideology
cor(lowerCombined$np_score,lowerCombined$krige.lower,use="complete.obs")

# Plot Legislators' DW-NOMINATE Scores against Public Opinion Ideology
plot(y=lowerCombined$np_score,x=lowerCombined$krige.lower,
     xlab="District Ideology (Kriging)", ylab="Legislator Ideology (Shor & McCarty)", 
     main="State Legislatures: Lower Chambers", type="n")#
points(y=lowerCombined$np_score[lowerCombined$party=="R"],
       x=lowerCombined$krige.lower[lowerCombined$party=="R"],pch=".",col="red")
points(y=lowerCombined$np_score[lowerCombined$party=="D"],
       x=lowerCombined$krige.lower[lowerCombined$party=="D"],pch=".",col="blue")