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.
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Sources
- Poole, K. T., & Rosenthal, H. (1985). A spatial model for legislative roll call analysis. American Journal of Political Science, 29(2), 357-384. DOI: 10.2307/2111172 ↗
- Clinton, J., Jackman, S., & Rivers, D. (2004). The statistical analysis of roll call data. American Political Science Review, 98(2), 355-370. DOI: 10.1017/S0003055404001194 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Ideal Point Estimation and Political Ideology Scaling. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/political-psychology/political-ideology-scaling
Which method?
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