Stephen Bainbridge (via Glenn Reynolds) isn’t impressed with the use of NOMINATE scores to cast John Kerry as more of a centrist; nor is he particularly thrilled with methods like NOMINATE to begin with:

Personally, I find the interest group scores much more accessible and transparent. For one thing, NOMINATE counts all nonunanimous roll calls, which can include a lot of procedural and uncontroversial (even nonpartisan) bills. The interest group rankings focus on bills that really tell us something about the political philosophy of the candidate in question. For another, the interest group ratings are widely used both by the media and, perhaps more important, by politicians themselves.

I’d respond that NOMINATE (and related methods) are preferable to interest group scores precisely because they count all nonunanimous roll calls; this avoids the selection effect where interest groups choose, say, twenty “key” votes as a litmus test for an entire session. And, presumably, those who vote on party lines on “nonpartisan” and “uncontroversial” bills are even more partisan than those who join with their natural opposition. Another worthy point in favor of NOMINATE: the “procedural” versus “substantive” distinction is largely subjective; cloture votes in the Senate, for example, are technically procedural motions to end debate (and potentially stop a filibuster), while procedural votes on rules in the House often have serious substantive consequences (by ruling certain amendments out-of-order, framing and controlling debate, and sometimes even amending the legislation in question).

Now, Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers are quite correct to point out that the statistical properties of NOMINATE are, at best, nebulous, although Lewis and Poole recently made a worthy effort to gain additional leverage on the bias and uncertainty of NOMINATE in Political Analysis. And, while some of the differences in the results of the techniques are the result of differences between the distributional assumptions of NOMINATE and the CJR scaling method* (which explains the differing positions of Kerry in years in which he missed a lot of roll calls), there are some good reasons to prefer the CJR technique—most notably, it’s significantly more tractable; you can estimate the model almost trivially using MCMCpack.

Anyway, for those with a morbid curiosity about these techniques, the latest American Political Science Review has an article by Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers called “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data,” which I recommend highly (and which you may or may not be able to access via this link).

I’ve posted previously on NOMINATE and related methods (again, in relation to John Kerry’s voting record) here and here. This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.