Political Ideology Scaling

Political ideology scaling estimates actors' positions on one or more latent ideological dimensions from their observed choices, most often legislators' roll-call votes, but also survey responses and donations. The dominant methods are Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE (1985) and the Bayesian item-response-theory (IRT) approach of Clinton, Jackman and Rivers (2004), which place legislators and the proposals they vote on in a common spatial map.