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Rating the Performance of the Ada in the U.S. Congress

URING the 1970s, literally dozens of interest groups began to assemble and publish ratings of U.S. senators and congressmen.1 The express purpose of these evaluations is to assess a legislator's roll-call voting behavior against either a broad ideological standard or a narrow set of interests most salient to the rating organization. Presumably, this exercise allows one to determine the extent to which a representative or senator is liberal, conservative, pro-labor, pro-business, pro-family, moral, etc. Naturally, the rating organizations promulgate their scales to reward their friends and punish their opponents in Congress. From a putatively more dispassionate perspective, political scientists also have employed some of these measures as independent and dependent variables in their research. In either case, an index arguably says something about the behavior of the congressmen and senators. In this paper, however, the primary objective is to evaluate the ratings of what is perhaps the most experienced rating organization, namely the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Even though some studies have examined composite indices, none has assessed the overall measure on the basis of the separate roll call which constitute the rating. In the present research, the key roll-call votes selected by the ADA for inclusion in its Liberalism Quotient (LQ) will be analyzed in order to determine if they form a reliable and valid measure of liberalism.