National Journal has released its 2008 rankings of members of Congress from liberal to conservative, which means it’s time for another reminder not to rely on their fairly primitive methodology. The rankings produced by UCLA’s Jeff Lewis and UCSD’s Keith Poole for the 110th House and Senate are vastly preferable (they scale almost all votes, rather than just a few, and use a far more sophisticated statistical approach).

PS I will admit, however, that National Journal does have a fun interactive web application based on their rankings. Too bad the data going into it are so lame.