How Did the New Members Change the Texas House in 2019
In 2018, there were 32 individuals who had never served in the Texas House of Representatives elected. Trey Martinez-Fischer had served previously and won back his old House seat after his unsuccessful run for the Texas Senate. Ideologically, how were these members different from their predecessors? After every recent session of the legislature, Professor Mark P. Jones of Rice University releases his calculation of the ideology of each House and Senate member. The calculation is based on each member’s roll-call votes that are contested votes. His calculation “. . . uses a Bayesian estimation procedure belonging to the family of methodological approaches that represent the political science discipline’s gold standard for roll-call vote analysis.” A negative number (e.g., -.04) indicates that the votes cast were left of center, or liberal. A positive number (e.g., 0.79) indicates that the member’s votes were right of center, or conservative. Republicans Replaced by Rep...