Since roughly the beginning of the year I have been loosely following the course of the U.S. presidential primaries and have noticed a trend towards candidates falling towards the extremes of the political spectrum as far as their stances on policy and governance. This is a strategic move in order to capture the vote of a given candidates party base to win the primary elections, and can be expected to reverse to an extent during the general elections where swing voters will likely be the target audience of rhetoric rather than those already deeply entrenched in the candidates own party. It has got me thinking though as to whether or not anyone has developed any sort of partisanship index in order to actually provide some sort of quantifiable measure of a given politician’s partisanship that could be used as a point of comparison between candidates.

The answer to this query as I found after doing a little digging on the topic is, yes, someone has published such an index, at least for congressional members. I have found an index published by The Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s public policy department that has indexed the bipartisanship of congressional members going back to the 103rd Congress which, served from 1993 to the end of 1994. I have not found such an index for members of the executive branch of government, presumably because such a thing would be much harder to quantify or standardize for a mayor or governor. However, since three of the five remaining primary candidates have served as congresspersons during that span, this at least gives a point of comparison for over half of the remaining candidates.

Here’s a brief overview of how the index works. The index is based on a point system whereupon congress members are assigned points for either drafting bills that are co-sponsored by members of the opposing political party, or for co-sponsoring bills themselves that were drafted by a member of the opposing party. A score of zero was then decided upon by calculating a 20 year average of members scores across cogresses. Therefore scores that are positive are evidence of bi-partisanship, and negative scores reflect a greater tendency towards only supporting initiatives within their party. The Lugar Center website explains that they view positive scores as evidence that the focus of the person in question is interested in functional governance, as opposed to a tendency towards using bills as talking points as a vehicle for posturing as denoted by a negative score. For a more in depth explanation of how the index is calculated as well as to view the actual index, see the Lugar Center website

The lifelong scores of members of congresses 103 to 113 range from 2.223 to -1.856 with a slight skew towards the negative; of the 227 members scored only 106 had positive scores.

So where do our current presidential hopefuls fall? Hillary Clinton score highest with -0.398. Next is Bernie Sanders at a -1.117 with Ted Cruz coming in lowest at -1.603. Only three representatives had scores lower than Senator Cruz, and both he and Senator Sanders scored in the bottom dozen for lifelong scores. Marco Rubio who recently dropped out of the race holds a score of -0.486.

To add a bit of context, the average lifetime score for members of congresses 103-113 is -0.068, while the average score of candidates who have run in the presidential primaries since the 2004 elections is -0.355. If we break down the 227 lifetime scores reported by The Lugar Center into five categories, ranging from very bi-partisan to very partisan, we can get a more qualitative measure of a congressional member by which category they fall into, which may be more straightforward to interpret than a specific number. A categorical breakdown dividing scores into five equally sized categories is as follows:

According to breakdown we can see that Clinton and Rubio fall into the somewhat partisan category, and Cruz and Sanders fall into the very partisan range.

John Kasich is not listed as he is a former governor with no congressional record, and as Donald Trump has not held prior political office there are no evidence at all of his willingness to work across party lines one way or the other. If I had to guess I would speculate that Kasich would fall into the negative range, probably the lower end of the somewhat partisan range, based on what I know of his policy work as Governor of Ohio. I suspect that Trump would score higher than many of the others knowing that he used to self identify as a democrat; those in the senate who have jumped parties tend to have positive scores for the most part.

There seems to be a growing trend towards partisanship in U.S. politics in the recent decade or so, a trend that is commented upon by The Lugar Center’s site, and that is also reflected in the average index scores of presidential primary candidates. Prior to this election season the average primary candidates index score since the 2004 election cycle was -0.0236, which with this cycle is decreased to -0.355.

Political partisanship while on the rise does not seem to be a deciding factor in this particular election season (I would say that an establishment vs. outsider dynamic seems to be on the forefront), though it is a telling indicator of the political climate that the U.S. finds itself in, and perhaps a factor in fostering the atmosphere that has made an anti-establishment status such an effective political platform to stand upon in 2016.

I choose to note that this post is not intended to be an endorsement by me for any candidate for political office, but merely an attempt to shed light on a political question that occurred to me to ask.