TexLege for iPhone

Unlike every other Congressional or state legislative iPhone application out there, TexLege includes a Roll Call Index to evaluate and compare the partisanship for individual Texas House Representatives and Senators.

I calculate the Roll Call Index scores using all the roll call votes taken in the previous full session. However, in order allow legislator score comparison from one session to another, I apply a statistical transformation on the data. In a sense, a legislator’s current voting record score is influenced by their scores in previous sessions. For the House, I use historical votes going back to the 72nd Session (1991). For the Senate, the calculations go back to the 79th Session (2005).

Caveats:

Don’t interpret these scores as a measure of ideology. That’s bad science. Most interest groups commonly make this mistake. Rather, these scores are a measure of partisanship within the voting record only. Partisanship in voting and ideology are two very different things.

You shouldn’t compare scores between House members and Senators, the scales are not the same. However, you can compare scores between members of the same chamber, or from one legislative session to another.

For more information:

The Roll Call Index originates from my dissertation titled “The Power of the Texas Speaker: Maintaining Influence and Governing over a Divided House”, available from www.umi.com or through your university’s library. I use Dr. Keith Pool’s W-NOMINATE software to generate scores for a single session. I then apply Dr. Gerald Wright’s modified Groseclose-Levitt-Snyder transformation to regress individual legislator scores from one session to the previous session, and so on.