Replication Data for: Express Yourself (Ideologically): Legislators’ Ideal Points Across Audiences

Abstract: Members of Congress face consistent pressure—and ample opportunity—to express their ideological positions. The most commonly measured outlet is congressional floor votes, but it is not the only one. This research develops three novel ideal point measures across different ideological expressions—votes, floor speeches, and tweets—to capture the understudied interaction between ideology, communication style, and audience. We find that legislators use speech and tweets to convey nuance in their ideological positions and to differentiate themselves from other members of their party in ways that voting does not allow. In general, Republicans use text-based opportunities, particularly Twitter, to express more conservative positions, while Democratic positioning is dependent on a legislator’s district and personal attributes. In both theory and methods, this work engages the considerable literature on the measurement of ideology and congressional representation. This research contributes to our understanding of legislator behavior, ideological positioning, and introduces three replicable ideal point models to measure the ideology of members of the U.S. Congress

摘要：美国国会议员始终面临着表达自身意识形态立场的压力与充足契机。学界最常采用的测量维度为国会全场投票记录，但这并非唯一的测量渠道。本研究针对三类不同的意识形态表达场景——全场投票、议会演说与推文——构建了三种全新的理想点（ideal point）测度方法，以捕捉意识形态、沟通风格与受众三者间尚未得到充分探讨的互动关系。研究发现，议员会借助演说与推文来传递其意识形态立场中的细微差异，并以投票无法实现的方式，与本党其他议员形成立场区分。总体而言，共和党议员会借助文本表达渠道——尤其是推特（Twitter）——展现更为保守的意识形态立场，而民主党议员的立场则取决于其所在选区与个人特质。本研究在理论与方法层面均吸纳了大量关于意识形态测量与国会代表制的既有研究成果，深化了学界对议员行为与意识形态定位的认知，并提出了三套可复现的理想点模型，用于测度美国国会议员的意识形态倾向。