ideological scores for state lobbyists

[mscarey]

We're talking about using state-level lobbying data to give ideological scores to lobbyists, based on the party affiliations of the state legislators they have the most contacts with. (Yes, this issue is a completely separate project from the existing Austin lobbying project.)

[gregoryfoster]

Thanks for undertaking this kind of work. It would be nice to develop a programmatic means to correlate activity to ideology, but I don't think it's going to be an easy endeavor. Based on my understanding of your proposal and work at the capital, this algorithm might work to identify outlier lobbyists who really are constrained by their ideology. But the process of generating support for most any legislation requires bipartisan cooperation - even in Texas. With that said, I would be very curious what the data says...