Legislator Rankings
State legislator rankings here.
Background
The RLC ranks legislators on votes affecting economic and personal liberties. Examples of economic votes include ones on free trade and tax cuts. Examples of personal liberty votes include ones establishing hate crimes and to fund the draft. You can get all the details on the methodology here.
The rankings
The RLC-MI has plotted the Michigan Congressional delegation’s rankings on the chart below based on these votes for each representative’s career. The bottom scale represents a continuum from state command and control of the economy (on the far left) to more laissez faire, free market votes (on the right). The left scale represents a continuum from more curtailing of personal liberties (closer to the bottom) to less curtailing–or even expansion–of personal liberties (closer to the top).
Shortcomings
Are the rankings perfect? Surely not. If you look over the collection of votes for the almost-two-decades worth of data, you’ll find votes allocated to the wrong category, you’ll find votes you think aren’t good proxies for identifying representatives’ ideologies, and you’ll find votes where you disagree with the compiler’s designated “libertarian” position. Nonetheless, we think it’s a great compilation.
Like we say on our FAQs, we are not a debate club. We’re happy to report the RLC’s results regarding Michigan’s representatives for your review. But if you do want to debate…
Help us out: future rankings
If you would like to help make future rankings more informative, we’d love your help. Let us know if there are votes of importance at either the federal or state levels that we should take into account in future rankings. Good state votes properly characterized as affecting personal liberties are especially rare, so we would greatly appreciate notice about those.