The 2015 Texas House, from left to right, according to Mark Jones

[William Tell]

The 2015 Texas House, from left to right

By Mark P. Jones, July 7, 2015
Photo by Todd Wiseman




Political scientists have long used roll call votes cast by members of Congress to plot them on the Liberal-Conservative dimension along which most legislative politics now takes place. This ranking of the Texas House of Representatives does the same by drawing on the 1,138 non-lopsided roll call votes taken during the 2015 regular session. As with previous rankings, this one uses a Bayesian estimation procedure developed by Stanford University professor Simon Jackman.


Methodology



In the figure below, Republicans are indicated by red dots and Democrats by blue ones. (Find party-specific figures for Republicans here and for Democrats here.) The figure is based on the roll call vote analysis and for each legislator provides a mean ideal point, referred to below as the Lib-Con Score, along with the 95 percent credible interval (CI) for this point estimate. If two legislators’ CIs overlap, their positions on the ideological spectrum might be statistically equivalent, even if their Lib-Con Scores are different. Also included are vertical dashed black lines, which indicate the location of the respective median Democratic (D) and Republican (R) representatives as well as that of the House’s median representative (F).


In addition, this table contains each representative’s Lib-Con Score and rank-ordered position on the Liberal-Conservative dimension, ranging from 1 (most liberal) to 148 (most conservative). House Speaker Joe Straus of San Antonio, who by custom doesn’t ordinarily vote, is not included here. Neither is Dawnna Dukes of Austin, who cast a vote in only 15 percent of the roll calls during the session. The table also details the ideological location of the representative in relation to his or her co-partisans. In each party, every representative’s ideological location was compared with that of his or her party caucus colleagues and then placed into one of seven mutually exclusive, albeit arbitrary, ordinal ideological categories going from left to right:

1. More Liberal/Less Conservative Than 2/3
2. More Liberal/Less Conservative Than 1/2
3. More Liberal/Less Conservative Than 1/3
4. Democratic/Republican Center
5. More Conservative Than 1/3
6. More Conservative Than 1/2
7. More Conservative Than 2/3

For example, representatives in the More Conservative Than 1/2 category have a Lib-Con Score and 95 percent CI that locates them at a position noticeably more conservative than half of their co-partisans. Similarly, representatives in the Democratic (or Republican) Center category are neither significantly more liberal/less conservative than one-third of their co-partisans nor significantly more conservative than one-third.

http://tribtalk.org/2015/07/07/the-2...left-to-right/

[William Tell]

[Vanguard101]

god Sarah Davis is awful. My state rep rick miller is terrible.

[William Tell]

The biggest disappointment is how Giovanni Capriglione turned over to the dark side. Not only the fact that he voted for Joe Straus for speaker. But he's freaking 44 on this list, he was in the top 5 last session. Some of the RINO's who beat our liberty candidates last time scored higher than Gio. It's the same story on any of the grassroots scorecards. His average votes sucked, he voted for some terrible, terrible things.

Yes, he did throw some crumbs to the base with one or two of his bills. But that was clearly part of his deal with Straus, to save face. Hopefully someone relatively decent runs against Giovanni, he's not longer of any value to us. Just look at some of the names that he's more pathetic than. It's embarrassing.


he even voted for HB 19 along with the rest of the RINO's which would have authorized a $10,000 civil fine for filming politicians in the capital without their consent.

He sold out.

I'm not one quick to call former friends of the movement sellouts, but there's no excuse for his record this session, absolutely none. He used us, he also broke his word to Debra Medina.