Abstract
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.
Highlights
Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest
Received: May 30, 2018; revised: July 05, 2019; accepted: April 03, 2020. These studies regularly rely on measures of legislator ideal points, party cohesion, and/or the dimensionality of the policy space that are derived from the roll-call votes (RCVs) record
The results indicate that the RCVselection concern is a potential issue for the overwhelming majority of research on legislative politics
Summary
Voting records are a key window into legislative processes around the world. Scholars use individually recorded legislative votes, or roll-call votes (RCVs), to study the influence of legislative parties on voting behavior (unity), the preferred outcomes of parties on key issues (position taking), and the character of legislative conflict (polarization). Received: May 30, 2018; revised: July 05, 2019; accepted: April 03, 2020 These studies regularly rely on measures of legislator ideal points, party cohesion, and/or the dimensionality of the policy space that are derived from the RCV record.. Using a formal model and simulations, we demonstrate that measures of ideal points, indicators of party unity, and efforts to capture the dimensionality of the policy space will be plagued by estimation problems if position-taking is the motivating story. This model is built on a set of assumptions that help maximize the chances an RCV sample is representative of all votes.. We seek to make clear the scope of the problem and to show that some of the currently accepted assumptions about benign data-generating processes do not hold
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