How Liberal Interest Groups Rate the Representatives (2007)

Many interest groups rate representatives on how they vote. Well-known groups that issue such ratings include Americans for Democratic Action (a progressive group) and the American Conservative Union (a conservative group). In the table below, we give the ratings of seven such groups and the mean value for each representative. However, the ratings are not completely independent. Usually representatives who get a good rating from the ADA get a bad rating from the ACU and vice versa. If we used four progressive groups and four conservative groups, every representative would probably get a score of 50%--not very interesting. To avoid this problem, we have only used (relatively) progressive groups. If you are a progressive, a representative with a high score is a good representative (supports everything progressive). If you are a conservative, a representative with a low score is a good representative (opposes everything progressive). In this way the differences between the representatives stand out clearly. The table below is sorted on mean rating. Additional ratings from other interest groups can be found at www.vote-smart.org.

The seven groups used in this study are:

The data is available for download in .csv format so you can slice and dice the data as you wish. The ratings are for 2007. For Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), some of his votes were made as a House member before he was appointed to the Senate.

Thanks to Ramy Rahal for collecting the data.

The data for the conservative interest groups is here.