Had a convo with a reporter today who asked if there was any data on how moderate Bollier is/isn't. Luckily, yes there is. Shoutout here to @bshor for his Measuring American Legislatures data, which quantifies legislator ideology using their roll call votes. What does it suggest?

First, some interpretation. Votes are used to develop mathematically an ideology score for lawmakers. Negative scores indicate more liberal, positive scores more conservative. The closer a score is to zero, the more "moderate" a legislator is on a left-right dimension.

Second, a caveat: the data that they have made available for individual legislators only goes through folks elected in 2016. Bollier switched to D after 2018, so her score in the data only represents her years serving as a R, not as a D. Still covers most of her ksleg service.

Bollier has a score of -0.205. So, somewhat on the negative side of zero. That puts her in the ballpark of Vicki Schmidt (-0.178), Joy Koesten (-0.224), Linda Gallagher (-0.227). Somewhat more conservative mods: Jan Kessinger (-0.008), Diana Dierks (0.036), Patty Markley (0.078)

Most Ds were more liberal than Bollier. Some of the "least liberal" Ds: Henry Helgerson (-0.362), Brandon Whipple (-0.368), Adam Lusker (-0.384), Jan Pauls (once a Dem; -0.416). Bollier is to the right of all but 4 Ds: Mark Gilstrap, Jerry Williams, Patrick Maloney, Allen Schmidt

What does mean? Generally, in the data, "moderates" tend to be closer to zero, as opposed to stronger ideologues. Mods also tend to cluster together, with mod Rs clustering a bit to the right of mod Ds. But that's all it tells you: more centrist than extremes. Nothing deeper.

Also, no one scores a perfect 0, unless you round. So you could say there is no perfect moderate, which sounds dumb. Rather, you could think of "moderates" as some arbitrary range a bit to the left and right of zero. I'll leave it to you to decide where the mod cut off should be.

Some of the most liberal members on this score: Valdenia Winn (-1.319), Annie Kuether (-1.314), Marci Francisco (-1.192), Louis Ruiz (-1.166), Jarrod Ousely (-1.034). Most conservative members: Trevor Jacobs (1.797), Francis Awerkamp (1.445), MPC (1.415), Randy Garber (1.349).

If you're familiar with DW-NOMINATE (I have tweeted on that), this is a similar measure. DW-NOMINATE is just for Congress, so isn't really comparable to these state leg scores. FWIW, those scores show that Marshall is super conservative. May do a thread updating those for KS pols

Also: ideology is not party. People within parties obviously vary in their ideology. But defining "moderate" is subjective. We can clearly say that lawmaker X is more moderate than Y on this score, but what is a moderate when no one is perfectly moderate? Where is the cut off?

That's where the subjectivity comes in. If you go by the score, do you draw the moderate line at +/- .2? Or .3? Or .5? If you say anyone less than 0 is "liberal," you're also saying no moderates exist on either side of zero. So it seems you do need a cut off point somewhere.

This also assumes that you define ideology by a lawmaker's total package voting record. Different people might prefer different definitions of ideology. One single vote in your mind or one single position that you take might make you liberal or conservative to some other person.

Anyway, thanks for geeking out on political data with me. And if you're one of my students in my statistics class right now, this is a great illustration of course content from this last week: defining terms, operationalizing measures, scaling. Quiz forthcoming!