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Rep. Gabrielle Giffords [D-AZ8]
U.S. Representative, Arizona’s 8th District

Photo of Giffords
State:Arizona [map]
District:8th Congressional District [map]
Party:Democrat

To contact Gabrielle Giffords, visit her official website. (Read our tips for communicating with Congress.) See the Project Vote Smart page for Giffords for more biographical and issue information.

Congressional Service

Gabrielle Giffords has represented Arizona’s 8th congressional district since 2007.

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by Gabrielle Giffords:

WhenRoleRepresenting
2007-2010
U.S. RepresentativeArizona’s 8th
(was preceeded by James Kolbe)

Sponsorship Analysis

"Ideometer"Giffords is a rank-and-file Democrat according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship.

These labels come from the Political Spectrum statistical analysis that we have carried out. The statistical analysis puts members of Congress on a scale based on patterns of bill sponsorship, and is blind to party affiliation and the content of bills. From there, we have somewhat arbitrarily divided the Members of Congress into far-left/right, rank-and-file, and moderate (i.e. centrist). For each party, the most extreme 23% of Members of Congress are labeled far-left or -right. The most centrist 30% (i.e. those closest to the other party) are labeled moderate. The remaining 47% are labeled as rank-and-file.

"Leader-Follower Score"
Giffords is a follower according to our statistical analysis of bills in this legislative session. Giffords tends to cosponsors the bills of other Members of Congress who do not cosponsor Giffords’s own bills. For more, see congressional statistics.

To compute the leader-follower score for Giffords, we make a table that lists all other Members of Congress. Each row has the number bills sponsored by Giffords and cosponsored by the other Member of Congress divided by the number of bills sponsored by the other Member of Congress and cosponsored by Giffords.

This is a measure of who is following who. The higher the number, the more times others are cosponsoring Giffords's bills without Giffords returning the favor. We then take the mean of (the logorithms of) these ratios. Thanks to Joe Barillari for the idea.

Voting Record

Voting RecordGabrielle Giffords missed 62 (2%) of 2771 votes since Jan 4, 2007. The graph to the left shows the number of missed votes over time. Click for a larger chart and a list of recent votes.

Committee Membership

Gabrielle Giffords sits on the following committees:

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Photo from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.