A Media-Based Measure of Presidential Ideal Points.

Based on the endorsements of more than 700 U.S. daily newspapers, we develop a measure of the ideological positions of presidential candidates between 1932 and 2008. Because our measure is rooted in the evaluations of external actors, it has the advantage of being exogenous both to the strategic decisions of the candidates in their campaigns and to their subsequent policy decisions as president. It also has the virtue of permitting us to locate losing candidates. We assess the validity of our measure through a comparison to other indicators of presidential ideology (e.g., Poole's (1998) common space scores), and demonstrate its usefulness through an assessment of presidential sponsorship of bills in the U.S. Congress. Importantly, our approach also allows us to locate the newspapers themselves in the same ideological space, which we show is potentially useful for investigation of media "bias" as well as the development of time-varying aggregate measures of state ideology. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]