Nominate: A Short Intellectual History

Abstract

When John Londregan asked me to write something for TPM about NOMINATE and "why we (Howard Rosenthal and I) went high tech" rather than using simpler descriptions of roll call data, I was puzzled for some time on how to explain why we did what we did. The problem is that my whole career has been devoted to testing a "high-tech" spatial theory so of necessity the methods I have employed over the years have been complicated. However, in the spirit of John's request, I will give a short intellectual history of how and why Howard and I developed NOMINATE in the form we did.