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Is Political Ideology Stable? Evidence from Long-Serving Members of the United States Congress
Franklin G. Mixon, Jr. 
1
Center for Economic Education, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA 31907, USA
2
Department of Economics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA
3
Department of Economics, University of New Haven, West Haven, CT 06516, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Economies 2019, 7(2), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/economies7020036
Received: 18 March 2019 / Revised: 26 April 2019 / Accepted: 30 April 2019 / Published: 6 May 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Public Choice)
This study extends the political science and political psychology literature on the political ideology of lawmakers by addressing the following question: How stable is a legislator’s political ideology over time? In doing so, we employ Nokken–Poole scores of legislators’ political ideology for members of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate who were elected prior to the 103rd Congress that began in early 1991 and who served consecutively through the 115th Congress, which ended in early 2019. Results from individual time-series estimations suggest that political ideology is unstable over time for a sizable portion of the members of both major political parties who serve in the U.S. Congress, while analysis of the pooled data suggests that, after accounting for inertia in political ideology and individual legislator effects, Republican legislators become more conservative over time. These results run somewhat counter to the finding in prior studies that the political ideologies of lawmakers and other political elites are stable over time.
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Keywords:
political ideology; roll-call voting; public choice; public policy; United States Congress
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MDPI and ACS Style
Mixon, F.G., Jr.; Sankaran, C.; Upadhyaya, K.P. Is Political Ideology Stable? Evidence from Long-Serving Members of the United States Congress. Economies 2019, 7, 36.
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