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Economic, social issues top concerns in state legislative scorecards

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June 9, 2015

By Audrey Ann Faber

Used as a yardstick by which politicians can be measured as friend or foe on a particular issue, ideology or policy area, legislative scorecards have become a staple in American politics.

According to one issue advocate, "the most powerful words I could say to an elected official were, 'My organization is scoring this vote.'"[1] These scorecards allow advocacy groups, unions and other types of organizations to rate lawmakers on the issues that matter most to them, such as free market politics, the environment or reproductive rights. While many of the scorecards issued at the federal level are the most well-known, there are also more than a hundred scorecards that rate the members of state legislatures.

The major producers of state legislature-level scorecards are nonprofits, and just over half of all of the scorecard producing organizations have a political ideology that leans conservative. There is no correlation between state size and number of scorecards, with some of the largest states in the country having only a small handful of scorecards.

These state legislature-level scorecards are aggregated on Ballotpedia to help provide context for readers on an official’s term in office, a policy or an incumbent’s voting record. To this end, we located, collected and organized hundreds of scorecards across 49 states.[2] For more information about what constitutes a scorecard or how we find them, please see the project page.

Scorecards by state

While some states, such as Texas, had more than 10 scorecards for their last legislative session, many had only one scorecard. Of the 50 states, scorecards were found for 49, with Alabama being the only state for which Ballotpedia was unable to find scorecards.

There is little pattern to which states' legislatures have more scorecards in the most recent year tracked. The most populous states in the union do not necessarily have more scorecards produced about their lawmakers, and neither does geographic location correlate with a higher or lower number of scorecards. On average, Republican-controlled legislatures have more scorecards than Democrat-controlled legislatures, but only by a margin of one (four to three). Furthermore, of the five states with the most scorecards—Texas, Wisconsin, Utah, Oregon and North Carolina—only Oregon is a Democrat-controlled legislature. Whether this pattern holds true for future legislative sessions remains to be seen.

The numbers below represent an overview of the scorecards available for each state, in the most recent year tracked. Because state legislatures convene at different times and sometimes in alternating years, the most recent batch of scorecards for a state may be 2013. In total, 189 scorecards were collected for the last year tracked across the 49 states, and hundreds more are available for years prior.

The major producers of scorecards

By far, the bulk of organizations that produce scorecards at the state level only release scorecards for a single state. Of the 103 organizations, only 15 released scorecards in more than one state. Of the top 15 producers, five organizations focused on issues that fall under the environment umbrella, making it one of the most popular issues for lawmakers to be scored on. Other popular topics include business and economic issues, social issues, labor issues and conservative policies.

Many of the major producers of scorecards are state or local affiliations of larger, national organizations. This explains why an organization produces scorecards in some states, but not all.

What kind of organizations produce the scorecards?

Figure 1: A breakdown of the type of nonprofits that produced scorecards.

The predominant producers of scorecards in each state were nonprofits, just over half of which have a political ideology that leans conservative.

Type of organization, by tax status
Only 18 of the 103 organizations were not a nonprofit; of those 18, 14 were political action committees (PACs). The remaining 85 were some form of nonprofits, with 501(c)(4)s and 501(c)(3)s jointly accounting for just over 76 percent of the nonprofits. Other significant producers of the scorecards included chambers of commerce and business collectives at both the state and city levels. In total, 30 reports were produced by these organizations, which have a tax status of 501(c)(6).

Type of organization, by ideological leaning
Of the 103 organizations, 54 of them—just over 52 percent—had a conservative political ideology. Organizations with a liberal-leaning political ideology accounted for just shy of 37 percent of the organizations, totaling 38 organizations. Finally, those organizations with a neutral political ideology accounted for nearly 11 percent. These nonpartisan organizations spanned the full range of organization types, including both nonprofits and PACs.

Figure 2: A breakdown of the political leanings of the organizations that produced scorecards

Conservative groups spanned across every type of organization in regard to tax status, with a particular emphasis on 501(c)(4)s (civic leagues, social welfare organizations and local associations of employees). The largest conservative producers of scorecards were various chambers of commerce (14), the National Federation of Independent Business (10), the American Conservative Union (7) and Americans for Prosperity (6). Of the groups that leaned liberal, the League of Conservation Voters (19), AFL-CIO (6), ACLU (5) and NARAL Pro-Choice America (5) ranked the highest in terms of reports produced. With the exception of the chambers of commerce that did not have a national affiliation, all of the organizations were national entities, and it was predominantly their state affiliates that produced the reports in each state.

Of the 189 scorecards reviewed, 94 were produced by organizations with a conservative ideology. Those 94 scorecards represented just shy of 50 percent (49.7%) of the scorecards. Liberal-leaning organizations produced nearly as many, accounting for 83 of the 189 scorecards, or 43.9 percent. Ideologically neutral organizations accounted for the remaining 12 scorecards.

Type of organization, by issue focus
Predominantly, organizations that produce scorecards focus on a single issue area, sometimes under a broad umbrella, such as business or social issues, and sometimes under a more narrowly defined issue area, such as animal protection or education. In total, seven broad umbrella issue focuses were identified, the most popular of which were social issues and business. The following chart breaks down the broad issue focuses of the groups by ideological leanings:

Figure 2: A breakdown of the political leanings of the organizations that produced scorecards.

Liberal groups focus primarily on issues that fall under the environment, ideological issues and social issues categories. No liberal group that focuses on economic issues produced a scorecard. Like liberal groups, conservative groups focus on ideological issues and social issues, but instead of environmental issues, they are interested in economic issues. No conservative groups were found to be focused on the environment.

In a review of the groups' more narrowly-defined issue focus, 24 different issue areas were found:

  • Animal Protection: 4 groups and 7 reports
  • Business: 9 groups and 33 reports
  • Campaign Finance: 3 groups and 3 reports
  • Children’s Issues: 3 groups and 3 reports
  • Civil Liberties: 1 group and 5 reports
  • Conservation: 2 groups and 20 reports
  • Conservative Issues: 13 groups and 25 reports
  • Consumer Rights: 1 group and 1 report
  • Education: 5 groups and 5 reports
  • Environmental Issues: 5 groups and 12 reports
  • Fiscal Policy: 1 group and 1 report
  • Free Enterprise: 2 groups and 2 reports
  • Free Markets: 2 groups and 2 reports
  • Legal Reform: 1 group and 1 report
  • Liberal/Progressive Issues: 7 groups and 7 reports
  • Liberty: 5 groups and 5 reports
  • Newspaper: 1 group and 1 report
  • Professional Association/Union: 11 groups and 20 reports
  • Property Rights: 1 group and 1 report
  • Reproductive: 3 groups and 10 reports
  • Social Issues: 14 groups and 14 reports
  • Taxes: 7 groups and 7 reports
  • Water: 1 group and 2 reports
  • Women's Issues: 1 group and 1 report

Find your state

Click on a state on the map to view the scorecards of lawmakers in that state. If you are aware of a scorecard Ballotpedia has not included, please email editor@ballotpedia.org.

http://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_scorecards_in_STATE

Methodology

What qualifies as a scorecard?

For encyclopedic purposes, Ballotpedia makes an effort to include all state scorecards (as defined below).

Ballotpedia defines scorecards as those produced by newspapers, interest groups, think tanks, partisan groups, 501(c)(3)s and 501c4s that provide relative rankings and cover all state or federal lawmakers.

Scorecards may also be referred to as voter guides or indexes.

  • Scorecards: records used to measure achievement or progress. The measurement and subjects in the record vary in each publication.
  • Voter guides: generally refers to pamphlets published and distributed by state governments just prior to an election. However, non-government groups, such as nonprofits, newspapers and interest groups, also publish guides for voters’ use. The guides may be written in an unbiased nature and present only what will appear on the ballot, or they may display whether the group supports, opposes or is neutral on an issue or candidate. The latter version is similar to and can be considered a scorecard.
  • Indexes: can refer to an alphabetical list of names, topics or items. However, it is also defined as a measure or an indicator. The term “indexes” is also used in reference to what Ballotpedia classifies as “scorecards.”

Where Ballotpedia finds scorecards

Ballotpedia makes every effort to collect as many scorecards as possible for each state, but is limited to those scorecards that are readily available and accessible. Research to find scorecards is conducted primarily through search engine queries, but also includes limited reference to Project Vote Smart. If you are aware of a scorecard Ballotpedia has not included, please email it to editor@ballotpedia.org.

How ideology is determined

While all nonprofits are required to be nonpartisan, almost all have an ideological leaning. For this project, all scorecard producers were assigned an ideology of Conservative, Liberal or Neutral. All three labels were broadly defined, with the understanding that a variety of narrower ideologies could fall under the broad label.

Groups fell into three categories, in terms of ideological identification:

  1. Their ideology was stated on their website
  2. The group did not self-identify an ideology on their website, but neutral third party sites such as FactCheck.Org and Open Secrets provided a description of the nonprofits' ideological leaning
  3. The group did not self-identify on their website, and no third party provided a description

The political ideology of the first two categories were taken at face value, and assigned accordingly. In the case of the third category, Ballotpedia identified the nonprofit's ideology by analyzing one or both of the following criteria:

  • Rhetoric on an organization’s website regarding the issues they support
  • A review of the scorecards themselves, with the expectation that liberal-leaning organizations will produce scorecards that vastly favor Democrats and that conservative-leaning organizations will produce scorecards that vastly favor Republicans. In the event that the scores favored no party in any considerable manner, the group was labeled neutral.

The full coding guidelines are available here. The full coding of organizations is available here.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Michael OBrien, Bill Track 50, "Legislative Scorecards – A Brief (& Unofficial) History," accessed February 13, 2015
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Note: As of February 2015, Ballotpedia has been unable to locate any scorecards for Alabama.
  3. ↑ Red dots denote Republican control of both chambers, blue dots denote Democratic control of both chambers and purple dots denote divided control of the chambers.
  4. ↑ United States Census Bureau, "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2014," accessed February 17, 2015
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