Roll-call Data Research Articles

Overcoming the cost of governance? Junior party strategy in multi-level politics

How can junior coalition members overcome the costs of governing in a coalition? In this article, we argue that junior partners can use supranational and subnational political institutions as a venue for signaling disagreement with their coalition partners to mitigate the brand dilution that occurs in the coalition. To test this argument, we use roll-call data from the European Parliament (EP) from 1999-2009 to demonstrate that when intra-coalitional conflict increases, junior parties are more likely to defect from the prime minister’s party. In addition, we find that while junior parties in general are no more likely to defect on votes focused on their owned issues, niche parties are more likely to defect from the PM’s party on their owned issues as intra-coalitional conflict increases. Our results have important implications for junior party behavior and how multi-level politics can be used to strengthen party brands.

How Does Party Position Change Happen? The Case of LGBT Rights in the U.S.

A partisan divide over LGBT rights has emerged in the U.S. Yet unlike other issues on which the parties have traded places or polarized, most of the change on gay rights has occurred within one party, the Democrats. How did this unusual change occur? LGBT rights was originally a fringe cause, rejected by most politicians in both parties. As gay rights activists slowly became more prominent in the Democratic Party, many politicians adapted, abandoning earlier positions informed by their personal backgrounds and state or district constituencies. Meanwhile, incorporating the religious right led most Republicans to maintain the anti-LGBT rights stand that was once common to both parties, even as public opinion shifted. The result was a partisan divide in this issue area that had consequences for policy. The role of adaptation by incumbents in producing it—contrary to some prominent models—is evident in both Congressional co-sponsorship and roll-call data. The growing party divide is also evident in platforms. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of how party position change occurs.

Explanations of Military Spending: The Evidence from Legislators

ABSTRACT While a great deal of research has examined determinants of military spending, few studies have systematically investigated how legislators vote on defense expenditures. This study fills this important gap. Based on a sample of roll-call data on defense spending from the 112th U.S. House, we estimate legislators’ ideal points through an item response model. Several interesting findings emerge. First, Republicans are more likely to favor military spending, a finding that is both statistically and substantively significant throughout our analysis. In addition, interest group campaign contributions play an important role by increasing the probability a legislator supports defense spending. Third, when a congressional district has a larger number of veterans or a lower rate of unemployment, its elected legislator is likely to favor military spending. Finally, the effect of public opinion disappears after the district demographics are controlled for.

Quantifying Vote Trading Through Network Reciprocity

Building on the concept of reciprocity in directed weighted networks, we propose a framework to study legislative vote trading. We first discuss the conditions to quantify vote trading empirically. We then illustrate how a simple empirical framework--complementary to existing approaches--can facilitate the discovery and measurement of vote trading in roll-call data. The application of the suggested procedure preserves the micro-structure of trades between individual legislators, shedding light on, so far, unstudied aspects of vote trading. Validation is provided via Monte Carlo simulation of the legislative process (with and without vote trading). Applications to two major studies in the field provide richer, yet consistent evidence on vote trading in US politics.

Co-sponsorship, note verbale, and association behaviour at the UNGA: an analysis of the death penalty moratorium resolutions

ABSTRACT Between 2007 and 2018, seven resolutions in favour of a universal moratorium on death penalty executions were adopted by the UN General Assembly. This paper provides an analysis of co-sponsorship and the note verbale of dissociation relating to those seven resolutions. Our assumption is that states which plan to vote 'yes' in the plenary will co-sponsor the resolution beforehand. We also presume that states which vote 'no' in the plenary will sign the note verbale invariably circulated several months later, as a further means of condemnation. However, many countries situate themselves in between these two groups of ‘genuine’ supporters and opponents. The countries in the middle evince inconsistency between their plenary votes and what we term their ‘association behaviour’ around the plenary, consisting of co-sponsorship (before) and adherence to the note verbale (after). This article analyses these countries to determine the underlying causes for their ambivalent, or even contradictory, positions concerning the moratorium resolutions. The findings complement not only our own previous research on states’ idiosyncratic voting in the moratorium resolutions, but also the broader literature that relies heavily on roll-call voting data to study state behaviour, rather than other means of expressing state preferences within multilateral institutions.

Multiple Ideal Points: Revealed Preferences in Different Domains

AbstractWe extend classical ideal point estimation to allow voters to have different preferences when voting in different domains—for example, when voting on agricultural policy than when voting on defense policy. Our scaling procedure results in estimated ideal points on a common scale. As a result, we are able to directly compare a member’s revealed preferences across different domains of voting (different sets of motions) to assess if, for example, a member votes more conservatively on agriculture motions than on defense. In doing so, we are able to assess the extent to which voting behavior of an individual voter is consistent with a uni-dimensional spatial model—if a member has the same preferences in all domains. The key novelty is toestimaterather thanassumethe identity of “stayers”—voters whose revealed preference is constant across votes. Our approach offers methodology for investigating the relationship between the basic space and issue space in legislative voting (Poole 2007). There are several methodological advantages to our approach. First, our model allows for testing sharp hypotheses. Second, the methodology developed can be understood as a kind of partial-pooling model for item response theory scaling, resulting in less uncertainty of estimates. Related, our estimation method provides a principled and unified approach to the issue of “granularity” (i.e., the level of aggregation) in the analysis of roll-call data (Crespin and Rohde 2010; Roberts et al. 2016). We illustrate the model by estimating U.S. House of Representatives members’ revealed preferences in different policy domains, and identify several other potential applications of the model including: studying the relationship between committee and floor voting behavior; and investigating constituency influence and representation.

Idiosyncratic voting in the UNGA death penalty moratorium resolutions

ABSTRACT On 18 December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a landmark resolution calling for a global moratorium on the use of the death penalty, with 104 votes in favor and 54 votes against. By 2018, there had been seven such UNGA resolutions tabled and passed. This article examines UN member states’ voting practices over these seven resolutions to answer the question: why do states vote as they do? UN member states’ votes on the resolutions are largely a reflection of their existing domestic laws on the death penalty: voting in favor if they have abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes, and voting against if they retain the death penalty in law and continue to use it. Not all member states, however, vote in a manner consistent with their domestic legal stance. Through analysis of the roll-call voting data, political statements from national leaders, background material on each country’s death penalty practice, together with interviews with representatives from several relevant UN Missions in New York City, in this article the authors discern and explain patterns in the idiosyncratic voting motivations of these states.

Leadership power, preference homogeneity, and legislative party conflict

ABSTRACTOver the past few decades, there has been a considerable increase in the level of partisan conflict. What explains the extent of partisan conflict experienced in legislatures? To examine this question, we develop aggregate-level measures of inter-party conflict from roll-call voting data on procedural and final passage votes during the 1999–2000 and 2003–2004 sessions to examine the mechanisms of polarisation in U.S. state legislatures. We systematically model inter-party conflict as a function of institutional rules and preferences. Our results suggest that the level of inter-party conflict (i.e. party polarisation) in legislative voting is largely related to the homogeneity of members’ electorally-induced preferences. However, we also uncover interesting institutional effects. Although minority party rights is the only institutional variable associated with inter-party conflict on final passage votes, majority party leaders’ committee appointment rights, committees’ discretion in reporting bills to the floor, and minority party rights each are strongly associated with inter-party conflict on procedural roll-call votes.

Sub-constituencies and Legislative Responsiveness: Evidence from the States

This article tests whether theories of congressional behavior that link legislative responsiveness to the preferences of sub-constituencies at the expense of party preferences apply to the state level. Using ten years of state-level data and roll-call data from nearly 4,000 individual votes on E-Verify legislation, I examine the competing influences of party and constituency preferences on legislative behavior. The results confirm that state legislatures/legislators are responsive to sub-constituencies, but find that responsiveness plays out in different ways depending on the level of analysis and the political party and constituents in question. These results have important implications for our understanding of legislative representation: because responsiveness to sub-constituencies can yield policy results that are antithetical to stated party goals, what appears to be collective irresponsibility from a party may actually be individual legislators striving to be responsive to those constituents that they anticipate will hold them accountable.

Strategic Coalitions and Agenda-Setting in Fragmented Congresses: How the PRI Sets the Legislative Agenda in Mexico

This essay suggests a theory of strategic legislative agenda control. It argues that a single party can effectively set the agenda under majoritarian gatekeeping rules without obtaining majority or even plurality status. The agenda-setting party need not be the median party in the assembly nor supported by executive-led parliamentary coalitions. The Mexican Chamber of Deputies provides a case study of how majoritarian gatekeeping and political context establish the conditions necessary for one-party-led agenda-setting in a fragmented congress with or without enduring coalitions. The failure of opposition coalitions to roll the ‘Partido Revolucionario Institucional’ evinces that party's ability to set the agenda through strategic coalition formation since 2000. High levels of party unity combined with strategic positioning have allowed the PRI to do so. The strategic nature of the PRI's coalition-making is documented and analyzed in the context of its historically pragmatic approach to coalition-making. The argument is supported by roll-call data analysis, using WNOMINATE, WRice scores, and roll rates.

The new Voteview.com: preserving and continuing Keith Poole’s infrastructure for scholars, students and observers of Congress

For the last 40 years, Keith Poole has developed and curated a trove of basic data and measurements related to the United States Congress. He has made these resources freely available through his widely-used Voteview.com website since 1995. At Poole’s Voteview.com, scholars, students, journalists, and the broader public could download gold-standard historical and current roll-call voting data, member rosters, NOMINATE scores, and measures and visualizations of party cohesion and polarization, among many other useful things. In this article, we describe how we are preserving and continuing these vast public-goods contributions through the new Voteview.com. Developed and housed at UCLA, the new Voteview.com carries on the creation of basic roll-call data infrastructure, including the assignment of Poole’s widely-used ICPSR number-like identifiers to new members, data on every roll-call vote ever taken, NOMINATE scores and other standard roll-call vote-based measures such as party-loyalty scores. In addition to serving as a platform for the continuation and dissemination of this basic data infrastructure, the new Voteview.com also provides powerful tools for exploring the history of roll-call voting, the US Congress, and American politics and political history through a simple search interface and interactive visualizations.

Estimating Ideal Points from Roll-Call Data: Explore Principal Components Analysis, Especially for More Than One Dimension?

For two or more dimensions, the two main approaches to estimating legislators’ ideal points from roll-call data entail arbitrary, yet consequential, identification and modeling assumptions that bring about both indeterminateness and undue constraints for the ideal points. This paper presents a simple and fast approach to estimating ideal points in multiple dimensions that is not marred by those issues. The leading approach at present is that of Poole and Rosenthal. Also prominent currently is one that uses Bayesian techniques. However, in more than one dimension, they both have several problems, of which nonidentifiability of ideal points is the most precarious. The approach that we offer uses a particular mode of principal components analysis to estimate ideal points. It applies logistic regression to estimate roll-call parameters. It has a special feature that provides some guidance for deciding how many dimensions to use. Although its relative simplicity makes it useful even in just one dimension, its main advantages are for more than one.

Legislative Parties and the Cost of Indiscipline in the Ukrainian Rada

Over the years Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has often been cited as a relatively chaotic legislature. the Scholars researching Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada have examined the causes of party indiscipline (e.g., Herron 2002a; Thames 2005, 2007a, 2016, 2007b; Whitmore 2002). Yet, few scholars have examined whether this indiscipline undermines the ability of parties to achieved their legislative agenda. Using roll-call and bill data from the Rada between 1998 and 2002, I analyze the costs of indiscipline. I find that while discipline for parties was often low, the costs of this indiscipline on floor votes was often low. Parties differed in the amount of costs they bore in predictable ways; however, the overall costs were not high. An analysis of agenda setting suggests that the agenda was controlled by parties to keep unpopular bills off the floor.

Electoral Incentives and the Costs of Indiscipline in the Ukrainian Rada

Does indiscipline hurt the electoral prospects of legislators? Using electoral and roll-call data from the Ukrainian Rada between 1994 to 2014, I test whether shirking affects the likelihood of Rada deputies running as partisan candidates and winning seats in the next election. I argue that the costs of indiscipline vary by electoral systems. I analyze the impact of ill-discipline on the electoral prospects of both single-member district (SMD) and proportional-representation (PR) deputies. The analysis shows that indiscipline has little cost for SMD deputies and modest costs for PR deputies.

Multiple Collective Principals and Legislative Cohesion

In many systems, legislators find themselves accountable to multiple, collective principals. This article seeks to answer to question‐how do legislators decide between collective principals and what conditions force legislators to chose one over the other. We argue that electoral uncertainty, operationalized as electoral volatility, pushes legislators towards the collective principal that has the greatest influence over their reelection. Using European Union electoral results and roll-call data from the 2nd6th European Parliaments, we show that increases in electoral volatility undermine parliamentary group cohesion and push legislators to side with the positions of their national parties over their parliamentary group when the two disagree.

Partisan polarization and US foreign policy: Is the centre dead or holding?

Scholars generally agree that most congressional decision-making behaviour has become characterized by partisan polarization. One area to which this consensus does not extend, however, is decision-making on foreign and national security issues. While a majority of scholars believe congressional foreign policy voting is now polarized, others insist that bipartisanship remains the norm. Examining roll-call votes in the House of Representatives from 1970 to 2012, this paper brings three new elements to bear on the dispute. Using a more comprehensive range of indicators, we re-examine the longitudinal data previously presented by scholars; we add an analysis of the roll-call data for the 2004–2013 period, and we utilize a static measure of polarization. Our analysis of the data reveals a cyclical trend of increasing and decreasing polarization and we conclude that it is too simplistic to characterize congressional voting on foreign and national security issues since 1970 as either partisan or bipartisan.

Оценка распределения влияния между политическими группами в Европейском парламенте в 1979-2014 гг.

The author analyzes the power distribution among political groups in the European Parliament from 1979 till 2014. Agent’s voting power is treated as the capability to influence the result of collective decision-making process. Often the voting power is not equal to votes share the agent possess. We obtain the values of classical and modified power indices for European political groups and compare their performance. The Banzhaf power index is employed to measure European political groups’ a priori power that does not impose any restrictions on coalition formation, and power indices that take into account groups’ preferences in coalition formation in order to measure actual voting power. Classical power indices are calculated using only votes’ distribution in the committee and a quota to pass a decision. Pairwise preferences allow to have respect to different willingness of groups to form a single coalition. In this paper preferences are modeled using the roll-call data from the votings on important issues of European politics. The less popular is the MP’s position, the smaller is the number of coalitions she can enter and the less is the voting power. We demonstrate that factions can exploit their position and acquire higher relative power than both share of seats and the Banzhaf index measures, and the Liberal group of the European Parliament forming coalitions with both partners from the left and the right is the case. Conversely, hard restrictions on formation of coalitions due to ideological differences can lead to less actual voting power than a priori.

The impact of informalisation: Early agreements and voting cohesion in the European Parliament

European Union legislative decision-making is increasingly shifted into informal secluded arenas. Scholars have explained this trend and analysed its consequences for bargaining success and democratic legitimacy. Yet, we know little about how informalisation affects legislative behaviour in the European Parliament. This article contributes to closing the gap, by theorising and analysing the impact of ‘early agreements’ on cohesion. Given the reputational, political and transaction costs of failing an early agreement in plenary, we expect political groups to invest heavily in discipline and consensus, and legislators to comply in votes. Using a new dataset, combining Hix et al.’s (2007) roll-call data with original codecision data (1999–2011), we show that informalisation increases cohesion but only for centrist parties. Rapporteurships and votes on ‘costly’ legislative resolutions also matter, but do not mediate the effect of early agreement.

Long-Term Consequences of Election Results

Voters in US elections receive markedly different representation depending on which candidate they elect, and because of incumbent advantages, the effects of this choice persist for many years. What are the long-term consequences of these two phenomena? Combining electoral and legislative roll-call data in a dynamic regression discontinuity design, this study assesses the long-term consequences of election results for representation. Across the US House, the US Senate and state legislatures, the effects of ‘coin-flip’ elections persist for at least a decade in all settings, and for as long as three decades in some. Further results suggest that elected officials do not adapt their roll-call voting to their districts’ preferences over time, and that voters do not systematically respond by replacing incumbents.

Putting a Lid on the Melting Pot: Determinants of American Immigration Policy

The closing of the United States to immigrants is arguably the most economically and socially significant policy shift in American history. The U.S. had virtually open borders until 1879, when the first of a series of federal laws prohibiting or limiting immigration of particular groups was passed. By 1924, immigration had been reduced to a small fraction of the peak in the 1890s. During this time frame, 42 major votes were considered in the House and 31 in the Senate to limit immigration. Using data from the U.S. Congressional record, I explain the policy shift in public choice terms: identifying voting patterns that can be explained by shifts in public and elite opinion, the incentives of policymakers, and changing economic conditions. Explanations of the policy shift from previous scholarship are evaluated in light of roll-call voting data and NOMINATE scores. Using multivariate analysis, I find that Congressional ideology was an important factor in the development of immigration restriction policy, with the most restrictive legislation passed when legislators from the rural South joined a Congressional coalition against immigration.