Using Proposition Votes to Estimate District Preferences on Issues

Scholars routinely use the 2-party presidential vote in a given legislative district as a proxy for the ideology of that district's constituents. Scholars also freely admit that this measure is imperfect, but works well as a proxy for the 2-party balance and is very easy to obtain. This paper proposes an alternative set of measures, that while only useful for some states, actually measure relevant opinions of the voters of a district on various issues: proposition votes. In states that actively use the proposition process, voter opinions are measured on numerous issues routinely. This paper seeks to advance the use of proposition votes as a measure in two ways. First, proposition votes allow for a cleaner test of representation on an issue-by-issue basis. Secondly, factor analysis of proposition votes allows for a more nuanced measure of overall district ideology, allowing us to separate economically conservative districts from socially conservative districts, for example