While reading about the upcoming special election in NY-23 (where the Constitution Party candidate is picking up endorsements from GOP biggies, at the expense of the candidate on the Republican ticket), I ran across a rather interesting piece of research (small PDF here).  Boris Shor has done some fairly detailed analysis of ideology in state legislatures; in other words, he's asking questions along the lines of "how consistent is our notion of "conservative" and "liberal" across the US?"  He answers the question by generating a notion of "ideological common space" for both left and right. 

In NY-23, for instance, his analysis shows that the GOP nominee really is a conservative - by New York standards.  His results were, to say the least, eye-opening.  The payoff chart is displayed to the right.

These comparisons are interesting when we compare party affiliantions between or among states (say, KY Democrats to CA Democrats), but they become downright fascinating when we make comparisons across states AND across the political aisle.  For instance, Shor's analysis suggest that a healthy number of Kentucky Democrats are more conservative than are New York Republicans.  Now, that happens to match my perception of Kentucky's politicians, but that's only one anecdotal data point.

Shor also made comparisons between the state legislators and the positions of Federal officials of their party.  The two gray lines represent the ideological midpoint of Congressional Democrats and Republicans.  Thus, we see that while Arizona's state-level GOPers are well-balanced in comparison to the national GOP profile, the State's Democrats are actually "further left" than are their national counterparts.

There's one really glaring example in Shor's results.  How much of California's current pile'o'woe has come about because both her Democrats and her Republicans are at the extremes of their respective parties' ideologies?

I'd be interested to hear how you think your state's legislators, both Democratic and Republican, fared in Shor's analysis.  Was he on the mark?  Way off base?  Pretty close?  Let's discuss...