I propose a new method to place lobbyists into standard common space measures for ideology scores, leveraging responses from former members of the U.S. Congress to a survey containing a battery of ideology attitude measures, along with a flexible Bayesian statistical model. The statistical model incorporates estimation uncertainty into the imputed lobbyist ideology measures and propagates that uncertainty to structural parameters within substantive outcome equations. I demonstrate the methods with an application to test whether members of Congress condition their questioning of lobbyists in committee hearings on ideological preference similarity.

Prof. Kevin Esterling