Building the RePass PTR Measure of Ideology

In the article "Searching for Voters along the Liberal-Conservative Continuum: The Infrequent Ideologue and the Missing Middle," the author presents a measure which can ascertain the ideological orientation of American voters. The measure identifies which voters are liberals, which are conservatives, and which are middle-of-the-roaders. The measure combines responses to four variables that can be found in most American National Elections Study (ANES) datasets since 1972. This archived document is a write-up of the exact method used to build the measure. The instructions also include the SPSS syntax used.