Ideological Cartography

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Each senator is marked by a two-letter state code and is color coded by party membership (Democrat, Republican, Independent). The top grey bar is the distance between the mean Republican and the mean Democrat (the standard measure of partisan polarization). The size of each party’s coalition is displayed at the end of the bars. The lower grey bar is the gridlock interval, which is measured as the distance between the filibuster pivots (the 34^th and 66^th most conservative senators before the Senate rule change in 1975 and the 41^st and 60^th thereafter). The ‘M’ imposed on top of the bar marks the position of the median senator.

The ideological estimates are constructed by scaling senate voting records with dynamic optimal classification. Keith Poole’s paper on optimal classification can be found here, and the paper which explains how to extend the method to smooth legislator ideal points over time can be found here.