As the popularity of formal analyses of legislative activity in Latin America grows, so does the importance of understanding the limits of the estimates produced by such analyses and the methodological adaptations necessary when using these measures to make formal comparisons. This research note details the considerations involved and demonstrates their significance with an empirical example using the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate. This empirical analysis leads to conclusions that are the opposite of those in the literature, suggesting that such formal comparisons across institutions need to be made with care.

2016Autorizo a reprodução e divulgação total ou parcial deste trabalho, por qualquer meio convencional ou eletrónico, para fins de estudo e pesquisa, desde que citada a fonte. This thesis seeks to analyse nominal voting patterns in the Brazilian houses of legislature, in particular the Federal Senate and with a focus on foreign policy issues. Foreign policy analysis through nominal votes has often been focused on the Chamber of Deputies, and so a primary objective of this thesis is to extend the discussion to the Senate, which is in many ways the more powerful institution in this area, in a way that is formally comparable. In order to do so, ideal points estimated through Bayesian Item-Response models are employed, including some novel adaptations and the use of certain aspects of the model that have not often been used to analyse nominal voting patterns before. The hypotheses posited in the literature for being determinants of voting behaviour are systematically examined and tested, using methods either new to the ideal-point literature in Brazil or rarely used, leading to findings contrary to the majority of the literature on several points, and in accordance with other studies on others. Esta tese busca analisar as votações nominais no Congresso brasileiro, particularmente o Senado Federal e com foco nos temas de política externa. A análise de política externa por meio de votação nominal tem sido limitada à Câmara dos Deputados, e nesse sentido, o primeiro objetivo desta tese é ampliar a discussão para incluir o Senado, a casa mais poderosa em muitos aspectos, numa forma que é formalmente comparável. Catalogação da PublicaçãoPortanto, pontos ideais estimados através de modelos Resposta ao Item Bayesiana são empregados, incluindo novas adaptações e a utilização de aspectos do modelo que não são frequentemente usados. As hipóteses da literatura das determinantes de comportamento em votações nominais são testadas sistematicamente, usando métodos que são ou novos à literatura de pontos ideais no Brasil ou pouco utilizados, resultando em constatações contrárias à maior parte da literatura em uns pontos, e de acordo com outros. I would also like to extend a heartfelt obrigado to my wonderful wife Marlene, for being so supportive through the many hours, weeks and months it took me to learn Bayesian statistics and R, and for understanding the hopefully-mild eccentricities of your husband. Last, but certainly not least, I thank my darling little daughter Sophie, for (forcefully) reminding me that there is more to life than Bayesian IRT models of legislative politics, and that political science research papers make great paper aeroplanes.

The paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-four replicator teams attempted to verify results reported in an original study by running the same models with the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. A “transparent” group received the original study and code, and an “opaque” group received the same underlying study but with only a methods section and description of the regression coefficients without size or significance, and no code. The transparent group mostly verified the original study (95.5%), while the opaque group had less success (89.4%). Qualitative investigation of the replicators’ workflows reveals many causes of non-verification. Two categories of these causes are hypothesized, routine and non-routine. After correcting non-routine errors in the research process to ensure that the results reflect a level of quality that should be present in ‘real-world’ research, the rate of verification was 96.1% in the transparent group and 92.4% in the opaque group. Two conclusions follow: (1) Although high, the verification rate suggests that it would take a minimum of three replicators per study to achieve replication reliability of at least 95% confidence assuming ecological validity in this controlled setting, and (2) like any type of scientific research, replication is prone to errors that derive from routine and undeliberate actions in the research process. The latter suggests that idiosyncratic researcher variability might provide a key to understanding part of the “reliability crisis” in social and behavioral science and is a reminder of the importance of transparent and well documented workflows.

In this research note, we introduce congressbr, an R package for retrieving data from the Brazilian houses of legislature. The package contains easy-to-use functions that allow researchers to query the Application Programming Interfaces of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, perform cleaning data operations, and store information in a format convenient for future analyses, making a previously-difficult task fast and convenient. congressbr downloads data on legislators, submitted and ratified law proposals, Senate and Chamber commissions, and other information of interest to social scientists across various fields. We outline the main features of the package and demonstrate its use with practical examples.

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