Following on my response to Ezra (see also Ezra again and Sarah), a Monkey Cage reader asks:
bq. Isn’t the way to assess the relative role of polarization & Senate rules to compare Congress to contemporary state legislatures that lack the role of the Senate but have the versions of the two national parties in incarnations fairly similar to the federal versions of the parties? For example, Missouri, Ohio, WA, MI, PA have parties that bear real similarities to the national parties (whereas, say, KY, MA, VA, ME, NH, CO do not).
Thanks to Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty, we are just now getting good estimates of ideology within state legislatures. But I don’t know of anyone who has tried to leverage state legislatures in a way like that proposed by this reader.
If any reader has any thoughts, please leave them in comments.