Lost in Translation: An Epistemological Exploration of the Relation between Historical Analysis and the NOMINATE Algorithm Richard Bensel, Department of Government, Cornell University The NOMINATE algorithm has become the most important analytical tool used in the study of the United States Congress. As such, congressional scholars have developed a great many social conventions, practices, and assump- tions that enable interpretation of the statistical artifacts the algorithm produces. However, as many of these schol- ars recognize, serious problems emerge whenever we try to translate these statistical artifacts into language and thus attempt to assign them meaning in historical analysis. These problems are irresolvable because they reside in the very construction of the algorithm itself. This symposium is intended to introduce the NOMI- NATE algorithm and data set to the American politi- cal development (APD) community. 1 While several ways in which the NOMINATE system might be used in historical research have been suggested, some of the limitations of the algorithm have not yet been fully addressed. This might perhaps be because the presuppositions underlying NOMINATE have become so familiar to scholars of Congress that they have become almost second nature. However, those same presuppositions are probably quite foreign to those who knew little about the NOMINATE system before reading these articles. For example, concepts such as “first dimension,” “ideal point,” and “policy space” must be learned by most members of the APD community in much the same way that a new language is learned: a process that begins by emulat- ing how the speakers of that language themselves deploy the concepts. 2 For their part, most members of the NOMINATE community have become so accus- tomed to these concepts that they no longer interro- gate or otherwise question how they utilize the specialized language that has developed around the NOMINATE system. Because the two communities are thus oriented toward the NOMINATE system in very different ways, I will start from scratch in an exploration of I would like to thank Ruth Bloch Rubin and Anthony Chen for guidance and advice. All mistakes are, however, my own. 1. I will use “American political development (APD) communi- ty” to denote those who self-identify with that subfield and “NOM- INATE community” to designate those who routinely use the algorithm. Although these communities are, as the contributors to this symposium generally recognize, distinct in some respects, they also overlap because some scholars belong to both groups and thus share a common interest in historical analysis that accu- rately portrays and interprets the political past. While my use of these labels indicates the respective general theoretical and empir- ical orientations of the two communities, my critique of the NOM- INATE system is intended to address their shared theoretical and empirical concerns. 2. I will refer to the articles in this symposium by the names of their authors. For example, “Bateman and Lapinski” will refer to David A. Bateman and John Lapinski, “Ideal Points and American Political Development: Beyond DW-NOMINATE.” On p. 169, Bateman and Lapinski write, “If the policy space were stable, the lib- eralizations to the [Social Security] program should be accompa- nied by midpoints that moved to the liberal side of the space.” On p. 144, Devin Caughey and Eric Schickler similarly ask, “How should congressional scholars, particularly those with a historical bent, choose an approach to measuring spatial change over time?” Only after extensive induction into the norms and conven- tions of the NOMINATE community could someone fully under- stand the metaphorical reasoning in these passages. Even after this induction, the actual content of these passages would remain metaphors with an unspecified (and perhaps unspecifiable) con- nection to the empirical reality they purport to represent. The in- duction into the NOMINATE research community thus requires both training in how to use the terminology of the community and the acceptance of an obscuration of how that terminology actu- ally applies to empirical reality. Studies in American Political Development, 30 (October 2016), 185– 201. ISSN 0898-588X/16 doi:10.1017/S0898588X16000122 # Cambridge University Press 2016 185 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X16000122 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 26 Sep 2016 at 12:58:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.