Locating liberals and conservatives in the Texas House after 90 days

By Mark P. Jones, James A. Baker Institute For Public Policy


The Texas House has now been in session for 90 days, with a total of 266 roll call votes that were at least minimally contested taking place during this period. Here I utilize these votes to provide an update of a previous analysis (conducted at the 60 day mark) locating the members of the Texas House of Representatives on the Liberal-Conservative ideological dimension along which most votes in the Texas House take place.

As was the case with the prior analysis, these ideological locations should be considered tentative, and are likely to change somewhat over the next six weeks as additional votes are held.

The three downloadable documents (All Representatives, Republicans, Democrats) provide the representatives' respective locations on this Liberal-Conservative dimension (which ranges here from the liberal extreme of -1.6 to the conservative extreme of 1.9) as well as a 95 percent credible interval (CI) for this point estimate. Only when a representative's CI does not overlap with that of another representative can we say with any real certainty that their respective locations on the Liberal-Conservative dimension are credibly distinct.

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As the figure for all representatives makes abundantly clear, the Texas House is highly polarized along partisan lines. Not only is every Democrat located at a more liberal location on this ideological dimension than every Republican, but there is absolutely no overlap of the CIs of any Democrat and Republican. As a result, we can, for instance, state with considerable certainty that at present the voting record of the most liberal Republican (former Democrat Aaron Peña) is more conservative than that of that of the most conservative Democrat (Joe Pickett).

Within the Republican Party there exists a considerable amount of ideological homogeneity, with 69 members of the delegation (out of a total of 100; Speaker Joe Straus does not normally vote) possessing an ideological location that does not differ significantly from four-fifths or more of their Republican colleagues. The remaining 31 representatives fall into either the conservative or moderate wings of the Republican delegation in Austin.

The conservative wing of the Republican Party (arbitrarily defined as those members who are significantly more conservative than one-fifth or more of the delegation) contains 17 legislators (ranging from Bill Zedler to Bryan Hughes in the figures). Within this group, six representatives stand out for their distinctive (i.e., significantly more conservative) voting behavior compared to their fellow Republicans, with over half of the delegation possessing voting records that are more moderate or less conservative. These six legislators (ranging from most to least conservative) are: Bill Zedler (87), Ken Paxton (81), Jodie Laubenberg (63), Tan Parker (58), Erwin Cain (51) and Leo Berman (50).

At the other end of the spectrum are 14 legislators (ranging from Aaron Peña to Larry Gonzales in the figures) who, at present, form the moderate wing of the Republican delegation in Austin. They have ideological scores that are significantly more liberal than one-fifth or more of their colleagues. Of note -- due perhaps to a combination of their personal ideological preferences, the ideological profile of the electorate in their projected House district and/or their future political goals -- six of these 14 representatives are either African American (Stefani Carter and James White) or Hispanic (Jose Aliseda, John Garza, Larry Gonzales and Aaron Peña). That is, at present this moderate bloc contains the Republican Party's two African American representatives and four of its six Hispanic representatives. Finally, three of these 14 House members possess an ideological location that is significantly more moderate than more than half of their fellow Republicans. They (ranging from least to most conservative) are: Aaron Peña (86), James White (68) and Sarah Davis (50).

The Democratic Party delegation is noticeably more ideologically homogenous than the Republican Party delegation, with the principal intra-party difference being the presence of a small group of conservative Democrats who have an ideological voting profile that is significantly more conservative than a large majority of their 48 Democratic colleagues. The four who stand out most as conservative within the Democratic delegation (from most to least conservative) are Joe Pickett (38), J.M. Lozano (35), Chente Quintanilla (33) and Sergio Muñoz Jr. (30). Among the party's most liberal members, only Lon Burnam has a voting record that is noticeably more liberal than that of more than one-third of his fellow Democrats.

Mark P. Jones is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy's Fellow in Political Science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University.