Executives are important elites, and ideology is important to elite behavior, but measurement challenges and a focus on the presidency have kept scholars from fully exploring executive ideology. This article advocates studying US governors to learn more about executive ideology. It provides an overview of the data scholars can use to measure gubernatorial preferences, and highlights Bonica’s campaign finance-based ideology scores (CFscores) as offering the greatest coverage and allowing common-scale comparisons with other actors. As a validation exercise, I find that CFscores explain within-party variation in other measures and predict the decisions that governors make when in office. Then, I run a preliminary test of the substantive importance of executive ideology. Four models explain state policy liberalism as a function of executive, legislative, and citizen ideology. Gubernatorial preferences emerge as most predictive of the three. These results encourage greater investigation into the role of executive ideology in the policy process.
Executives are important elites, and ideology is important to elite behavior, but measurement challenges and a focus on the presidency have kept scholars from fully exploring executive ideology. This article proposes that students of executive politics may be well-served by turning to the gubernatorial context, where campaign finance-based ideology scores (Bonica 2014) provide a common-scale measure of executive preferences. These scores, or CFscores for short, are drawn from 103 million campaign contributions based on patterns of "who gives to whom?" A series of validation exercises show that CFscores provide valuable information about executive preferences, even among governors of the same party. I then use these scores to assess the centrality of executives in the policymaking process. Four models explain state policy liberalism as a function of executive, legislative, and citizen ideology. Gubernatorial preferences emerge as the most predictive of the three. Executive ideology is more explanatory than legislative preferences when Democrats are in office and dwarfs the predictive power of public opinion in all cases. A one standard deviation shift in executive ideology corresponds with 2.3 to 8.3 times more policy change than a similar shift in public opinion.
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