Below is the Principles of Liberty legislative scorecard from 2011. This analysis is unique in that it does not rate a handful of bills on a single subject. Rather, it compiles legislators' votes across 355 bills. Each bill was reviewed for applicability of a principle of liberty, which are listed across the top of the scorecard. There could be 1-4 different principles applicable on any given bill. There are a total of 100 legislators, and votes were recorded for every legislator for any initial committee vote, and the final floor vote (3rds) if applicable, for each of the 355 bills that were reviewed (a little over half of all legislation proposed last year). This resulted in 24,262 data points for the scorecard. Some legislators have more, some have less, depending on committee assignments, what bills went where, etc. One point to note is the number of data points for each principle. For example, bills involving the principle of limited constitutional government created 6,761 data points in the House, and 3,850 data points in the Senate - the most often rated principle. There were other principles that did not receive much attention. Principles have been slightly revised for 2012 and will be posted later this week. You can see that some principles have more statistical significance than others. The Overall Average Score is weighted for each person by the number of data points in each principle. Since I am a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, I am familiar with statistics, so please don't try to comment on the methodology - if you have a question, please message or email me. It gets complicated.

The scores are not curved, and a score of 100% is not a reasonable expectation. However, the closer, the better. More important are the relative scores across legislators on each principle. Some general themes play out as you would expect. However, there are some individual surprises that jump out from the data. I will leave each to their own interpretation of the data.