Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

Since the publication of Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes’ The American Voter , if not before, there has been a debate in political science about the conceptualization of party identification. As the debate has played out, there have developed two competing viewpoints. One view holds that party identification is established through political socialization, is fixed fairly early in one’s political life, and is one of the more, if not the most, stable political attitudes. It is, according to this conception, the lens through which all politics is viewed. It is the result of a “funnel of causality,” which provides the basis for other political views or issue positions. The other view holds that party identification can and does change as one experiences a party’s selection of candidates and considers the party’s positions on issues. As a result, party identification is the result of a constant tallying by the individual of a party’s issue positions and its candidates for publi...

Mark Jones of Rice University released his calculations of the Lib-Con scores for members of the Texas Senate during the regular and special sessions of the 83rd Legislature. The results aren't particularly surprising: Garcia is the most liberal, and Patrick is the most conservative. What is surprising is the distance between the least liberal Democrat (Eddie Lucio, Jr.) and the most liberal Republican (John Corona), which is .44. The average Lib-Con score for Republicans is 0.02, and the average Lib-Con score for Democrats is -1.27. The following chart plots the position for each member of the Texas Senate. (Democrats are in Blue, and Republicans are in Red.) This is Jones' plot of the Senators' Lib-Con Scores