Integrating Voting Theory and Roll Call Analysis: A Framework

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D. Clinton ◽  
Adam Meirowitz

Scholars of legislative studies typically use ideal point estimates from scaling procedures to test theories of legislative politics. We contend that theory and methods may be better integrated by directly incorporating maintained and to be tested hypotheses in the statistical model used to estimate legislator preferences. In this view of theory and estimation, formal modeling (1) provides auxiliary assumptions that serve as constraints in the estimation process, and (2) generates testable predictions. The estimation and hypothesis testing procedure uses roll call data to evaluate the validity of theoretically derived to be tested hypotheses in a world where maintained hypotheses are presumed true. We articulate the approach using the language of statistical inference (both frequentist and Bayesian). The approach is demonstrated in analyses of the well-studied Powell amendment to the federal aid-to-education bill in the 84th House and the Compromise of 1790 in the 1st House.

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Treier

Although estimating the revealed preferences of members of Congress is straightforward, estimating the position of the president relative to Congress is not. Current estimates place the president as considerably more ideologically extreme than one would expect. These estimates, however, are very sensitive to the set of presidential positions used in the roll call analyses for the 103rd through 109th Congresses. The president often obtains more moderate ideal point estimates relative to Congress when including positions based on signing bills into law.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-118
Author(s):  
Eric Paul Svensen

Perhaps no separation of powers issue receives as much scholarly attention as the near monopoly modern presidents exert over foreign policy. Yet, despite an extensive literature on the subject, scholars have drawn different conclusions as to the causes of this change, finding that lawmakers either defer to the president or are equal and coordinate actors on foreign policy. Using the separation of powers as a guide, I attempt to rectify these differences and demonstrate instances in the roll call record where examples of both explanations are most evident. Recovering ideal point estimates between the 87th and 112th Congress on votes highlighting competing governmental objectives, findings show that the chamber median frequently shifts toward the president on foreign policy votes in the final passage stage and during the treaty process. However, evidence also shows Congress is less likely to defer to the president on domestic legislation and appropriations.


2011 ◽  
Vol 105 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
BORIS SHOR ◽  
NOLAN McCARTY

The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U.S. legislatures, and supranational organizations. Yet one potentially fruitful laboratory for testing spatial theories, the individual U.S. states, has remained relatively unexploited, for two reasons. First, state legislative roll call data have not yet been systematically collected for all states over time. Second, because ideal point models are based on latent scales, comparisons of ideal points across states or even between chambers within a state are difficult. This article reports substantial progress on both fronts. First, we have obtained the roll call voting data for all state legislatures from the mid-1990s onward. Second, we exploit a recurring survey of state legislative candidates to allow comparisons across time, chambers, and states as well as with the U.S. Congress. The resulting mapping of America's state legislatures has great potential to address numerous questions not only about state politics and policymaking, but also about legislative politics in general.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Mirosław Szreder

Increasing numbers of non-random errors are observed in contemporary sample surveying – in particular, those resulting from no response or faulty measutrements (imprecise statistical observation). Until recently, the consequences of these kinds of errors have not been widely discussed in the context of the testing of hypoteses. Researchers focused almost entirely on sampling errors (random errors), whose magnitude decreases as the size of the random sample grows. In consequence, researchers who often use samples of very large sizes tend to overlook the influence random and non-random errors have on the results of their study. The aim of this paper is to present how non-random errors can affect the decision-making process based on the classical hypothesis testing procedure. Particular attention is devoted to cases in which researchers manage samples of large sizes. The study proved the thesis that samples of large sizes cause statistical tests to be more sensitive to non-random errors. Systematic errors, as a special case of non-random errors, increase the probability of making the wrong decision to reject a true hypothesis as the sample size grows. Supplementing the testing of hypotheses with the analysis of confidence intervals may in this context provide substantive support for the researcher in drawing accurate inferences.


Author(s):  
Yuqiao Yang ◽  
Xiaoqiang Lin ◽  
Geng Lin ◽  
Zengfeng Huang ◽  
Changjian Jiang ◽  
...  

In this paper, we explore to learn representations of legislation and legislator for the prediction of roll call results. The most popular approach for this topic is named the ideal point model that relies on historical voting information for representation learning of legislators. It largely ignores the context information of the legislative data. We, therefore, propose to incorporate context information to learn dense representations for both legislators and legislation. For legislators, we incorporate relations among them via graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) for their representation learning. For legislation, we utilize its narrative description via recurrent neural networks (RNN) for representation learning. In order to align two kinds of representations in the same vector space, we introduce a triplet loss for the joint training. Experimental results on a self-constructed dataset show the effectiveness of our model for roll call results prediction compared to some state-of-the-art baselines.


Author(s):  
Olivier Costa

This chapter proposes an assessment of the state of the study of legislative politics in France. It starts with a review of how the study of legislative politics has developed comparatively over time and identifies the major current debates in the comparative literature. Then it turns to the French case, explaining its weaknesses and peculiarities, and assessing the current state of legislative studies in France. We see that, for a long time, legislative studies were rare in the landscape of French political science. Things, though, have evolved since the end of the 1990s, when there was a renewed scholarly interest in central institutions and actors of the French political regime as well as the emergence of new work that was better connected with the methods, theories, and topics of mainstream legislative studies. Finally, we underline some dimensions of the agenda for the future study of legislative politics in France.


MAKILA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-28
Author(s):  
Sitna Marasabessy ◽  
Bokiraiya Latuamury ◽  
Iskar Iskar ◽  
Christy C.V. Suhendy

Green open space is at least a minimum requirement for an environmentally sustainable city at 30% of the total area. Pressure on green free space, especially the Green belt area in the river border, tends to increase from year to year due to an increase in urban population. Therefore, this study aims to analyze people's perceptions of the green belt vegetation's role in the watershed of the Wae Batu Gajah watershed in Ambon City. The research method uses descriptive methods that describe a situation based on facts in the field and do not treat the object, with the hypothesis testing procedure using Chi-Square. The results showed that the community's socio-economic parameters consisting of age, formal education, and occupation had a significant influence on the understanding of the green border of the river. In contrast, gender and marital status parameters have no significant effect on understanding the green belt border. Formal education can influence attitudes and behavior through values, character, and understanding of a problem built in stages in a person. The type of work a person has for a long time working will affect the environment's mindset and behavior. The poor only have two sources of income, through salaries / informal business surpluses for basic needs.


2009 ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
George H. Weinberg ◽  
John A. Schumaker

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 691-706
Author(s):  
CAITLIN AINSLEY ◽  
CLIFFORD J. CARRUBBA ◽  
BRIAN F. CRISP ◽  
BETUL DEMIRKAYA ◽  
MATTHEW J. GABEL ◽  
...  

Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest. However, the usefulness of the roll-call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent. After laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll-call record is important, we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers, finding that roll calls are typically discretionary. We then consider two arguments for discounting the potential problem: (a) roll calls are ubiquitous, especially where the threshold for invoking them is low or (b) the strategic incentives behind requests are sufficiently benign so as to generate representative samples. We address the first defense with novel empirical evidence regarding roll-call prevalence and the second with an original formal model of the position-taking argument for roll-call vote requests. Both our empirical and theoretical results confirm that inattention to vote method selection should broadly be considered an issue for the study of legislative behavior.


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