Tausanovitch, Chris, and Christopher Warshaw. “Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures, and Cities.”
Journal of Politics 75, no. 02 (April 2013): 330– 342.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017...n_tab_contents
They maintain a database derived from the methodology they presented in this article which gives an ideological score to all cities and towns (among others).
Quote:
We provide new estimates of the ideological preferences and presidential voting behavior of Americans at the local level. We combine estimates of the ideology of about one million Americans based on 18 large-scale surveys between 2006-2021 with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of zipcode tabulation areas, states, counties, cities, subcounty units, school districts, congressional districts, and state legislative districts. We also aggregate presidential voting behavior to the level of these geographic units. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels.
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Here is a link to the 2022 white paper they wrote updating the method and calculations:
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.x...14&version=1.0
See here for the database:
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/datase...910/DVN/BQKU4M
Each city comes with 2 scores, each published for three time periods (2004-2011, 2012-2016, and 2017-2021). The first set of scores (IRT) are unweighted and are simply reporting what the average is for the actual respondents. The second set of scores use post-stratified multilevel regression on the respondents to account for non-response bias of others in their jurisdiction.
These are the scores you want (and are the column labeled MRP_ideology) to grab for your municipality. Lower scores mean more liberal, higher scores mean more conservative and the scores are quasi-standardized so they should range from approx. -1 to 1 and 0 indicates a perfectly moderate ideological ideal point for that municipality. For anyone familiar with DW-Nominate Scores, these are the comparable.
Here are the scores for some major Texas cities:
Austin—
2004-2011:
-.018
2012-2016:
-0.19
2017-2021:
-0.27
Dallas—
2004-2011:
-0.13
2012-2016:
-0.12
2017-2021:
-0.17
Houston—
2004-2011:
-0.06
2012-2016:
-0.07
2017-2021:
-0.11
Fort Worth—
2004-2011:
0.06
2012-2016:
0.12
2017-2021:
0.03
El Paso—
2004-2011:
-0.00
2012-2016:
-0.01
2017-2021:
-0.14
McAllen—
2004-2011:
0.01
2012-2016:
-0.01
2017-2021:
-0.16
Brownsville—
2004-2011:
-0.15
2012-2016:
-0.03
2017-2021:
-0.12
Note: blue=liberal, red=conservative, black=within standard error of zero.