Texas Politics

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Texas Republicans and Democrats largely mirror their southern colleagues ideologically. Texas did not elect any Republicans to Congress until the mid-1950s. Since then Republican share of the Texas congressional delegation has grown steadily, as the background indicates. Ideologically, Texas Republicans have tended to be quite conservative. Texas Democrats, on the other hand, have been a mixed bunch. During the 1950s and 1960s, Texas Democrats, led by New Dealers like Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, tended to be on average somewhat more liberal than their southern counterparts. Since then, as conservative Texas Democrats switched to the Republican party, Texas Democrats as a group, like their southern counterparts, have become steadily more liberal and more like the rest of their party nationally.

Source: Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)

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Full Source: Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) ratings are a standard institutional measure of political liberalism nationally, at the regional and state level, and for individual members of Congress. ADA ratings are constructed using a list of 20 roll call votes in Congress during a given year on a wide array of issues identified as important by ADA leadership. Each member of Congress receives five points for each issue vote on which he or she supports the ADA's prefered position and zero points for opposition or absence/abstention. The highest possible (most liberal) rating is 100. The lowest possible (most conservative) rating is 0.

National party ratings are averages of ratings of all members of the House and Senate combined. ADA ratings 1947-1996 were obtained from Prof. Tim Groseclose's website at http://wesley.stanford.edu/groseclose.

Ratings for 1997 and 1998 were compiled from the 1998 and 2000 editions of the Almanac of American Politics and from CQ's Politics in America 2000. Ratings for 1999-2003 are from the ADA website at http://www.adaction.org which also archives ratings since 1985. Note the ADA did not publish ratings in 1962. Ratings from 2003 - 2007 are from Anderson, Sarah and Philip Habel. "Revisiting Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress, 1947–2007" Political Analysis Advance Access published on December 16, 2008. doi:10.1093/pan/mpn015 also available at http://habel.siuc.edu/data/

Ideology in the Texas Congressional Delegation