UK OC OK? Interpreting Optimal Classification Scores for the U.K. House of Commons

Spirling, Arthur; McLean, Iain

doi:10.1093/pan/mpl009

Cited by 80 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This is not always the case. In the UK House of Commons, almost all voting behavior is explained by whether an MP's party is in government (Spirling and McLean 2007). In the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, voting behavior reflects a mixture of legislator ideology and membership in the governing coalition (Zucco and Lauderdale 2011). 3 on a single legislative act, such as a motion of confidence (Laver and Benoit 2002), contributions to the government's annual budget debate , or speeches on a particular bill (Schwarz, Traber and Benoit Forthcoming).…”

Section: Measuring Preference Variation From Text Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Lauderdale

Herzog²

2016

Polit. anal.

139

100

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Table A1 provides an overview of the speeches and debates included in our analysis. In an average electoral period, there were 8,707 speeches across 779 debates in the Irish Dáil and 7,464 speeches across 584 debates in the US Senate. The 112th and 113th Senates stick out at as the two least productive Senates in terms of number of speeches and debates, which is most likely the result of legislative gridlock after the Republican party took over the House in the 2010 election.The average debate in our data set consists of 12 speakers, ranging from a minimum of 5 speakers (our lower threshold) to as many as 73 speakers. At the level of individual speeches, we find an average of 683 and 552 words per speech and legislature. The longest individual speech in our data set is 37,610 words long, which is senator Ted Cruz's (TX-R) 21-hour filibuster speech in September 2013. Sources Additional Analysis of Classification and Uncertainty versus WordfishIn the main text, we show plots of the relationships between individual TDs Wordshoal score and coalition membership, and uncertainty estimates for the 30th Dáil. In Figure A1 we show the corresponding plots for the 29th Dáil. Figure A1: The association between the estimated positions of each legislator and their status as members of the coalition versus opposition, with correlation and local linear smooth, under Wordfish (left) and our approach (right), for the 29th Dáil. In the bottom row, we show the 95% intervals associated with the estimates for each legislator under Wordfish (left) and Wordshoal (right). A5 Dail 29Type of debate Beta root mean square Analysis of Variation in Disagreement by Legislative StageThe Wordshoal model facilitates assessments of the relative extent to which different kinds of debates align with the estimated common dimension. The greater the magnitude of the β j , the greater the extent to which the common dimension predicts speech variation in a given debate. As our summary statistic for β j , we use the root mean square of the β j , weighted by the number of speeches in each debate speeches j .In the paper, we utilize this statistic only for the US Senate, here we assess it across different types of parliamentary debates in Ireland. The majority of debates in our data take place during the second reading of a bill, which is the most important legislative stage after which a bill is formally accepted or rejected. The second most common type are motions, which are an instrument of parliament to scrutinize the work of the government. This includes ad hoc motions on topical issues, seasonal adjournment debates, and (less frequently) A6 motions of confidence in the government or in individual cabinet members (Gallagher 2010). Figure A2 shows the weighted root mean square of β j for motions, second-stage bills, and for debates during the remaining legislative stages, which we group together because of the small number of observations at each stage. We find high government-opposition division during debates on motions, which are mostly used by...

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Section: Measuring Preference Variation From Text Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Lauderdale

Herzog²

2016

Polit. anal.

139

100

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“…Moreover, interviews and statements made during parliamentary debate appear at the bottom of the hierarchy, but it is still questionable whether such evidence can be considered as representative under the party as a unitary actor assumption (Gemenis, 2012). Equally controversial is using evidence from legislative voting in order to gauge parties' positions, as it is well established that voting patterns often reflect party discipline and government-opposition dynamics, which implies that roll-calls cannot always be considered as parties' ideal point estimates (Spirling and McLean, 2007).…”

Section: Coding Reliability Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

Gemenis

2012

Acta Polit

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The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs.

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“…Meanwhile the rebels, who vote 'with' the opposition some positive proportion of the time, will be placed somewhere in the 'middle' (Spirling and McLean, 2007). No straightforward post-estimation rotation or stretching of that space can resolve the difficulty.…”

Section: Scaling and Projectingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In general, the methods used by political scientists to analyze such voting data are best applied to voting records from legislatures, such as the US Senate and House of Representatives, that feature relatively weak parties composed of fairly autonomous legislators (Spirling and McLean, 2007). The reason for this is that the usual models rely on a number of structural assumptions that are typically not even approximately met in parliamentary systems with highly disciplined parties organized around the dichotomy between government and opposition.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While much has been written on intra-party factions in the UK (Cowley, 2002;Shaw, 1988;Berrington and Hague, 1998;Spirling and McLean, 2007) most of this work relies on relatively crude methods of data analysis. By taking a more sophisticated model-based approach we hope to sharpen existing insights into intra-party divisions within the UK Labour Party.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying Intraparty Voting Blocs in the U.K. House of Commons

Spirling

Quinn

2010

Journal of the American Statistical Association

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Legislative voting records are an important source of information about legislator preferences, intra-party cohesiveness, and the divisiveness of various policy issues. Standard methods of analyzing a legislative voting record tend to have serious drawbacks when applied to legislatures, such as the UK House of Commons, that feature highly disciplined parties, strategic voting, and large amounts of missing data. We present a method (based on a Dirichlet process mixture model) for analyzing such voting records that does not suffer from these same problems. Our method is modelbased and thus allows one to make probability statements about quantities of interest. It allows one to estimate the number of voting blocs within a party or any other group of MPs. Finally, it can be used as both a predictive model and an exploratory model. We illustrate these points through an application of the method to the voting records

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UK OC OK? Interpreting Optimal Classification Scores for the U.K. House of Commons

Cited by 80 publications

References 8 publications

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

Identifying Intraparty Voting Blocs in the U.K. House of Commons

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