Unpredictable Voters in Ideal Point Estimation

Lauderdale, Benjamin E.

doi:10.1093/pan/mpp038

Cited by 42 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…11 Like the debate-score aggregation model, this is a heteroskedastic-by-legislator scaling model (Lauderdale 2010) and treats Senators ideals points as constant over time in order to isolate the effects of legislator replacement and avoid difficulties with inter-temporal identification.…”

Section: Us Senatementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Lauderdale

Herzog²

2016

Polit. anal.

Self Cite

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: Us Senatementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Lauderdale

Herzog²

2016

Polit. anal.

Self Cite

139

100

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“…See, e.g., Jessee 2009;Schofield et al 1998. 20 This works very similar to Lauderdale's analysis of unpredictable voters in ideal point analysis, in that some actors systematically deviate from the ideological expected behavior due to increasing variance (see Lauderdale 2010). 21 In order to illustrate this further, one might employ a simplified version of an item-response model.…”

Section: Policy Platformsmentioning

confidence: 82%

A Matter of Representation: Spatial Voting and Inconsistent Policy Preferences

Stoetzer¹

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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The application of spatial voting theories to popular elections presupposes an electorate that chooses political representatives on the basis of their well-structured policy preferences. Behavioral researchers have long contended that parts of the electorate instead hold unstructured and inconsistent policy beliefs. This article proposes an extension to spatial voting theories to analyze the effect of varying consistency in policy preferences on electoral behavior. The model results in the expectation that voters with less consistent policy preferences will put less weight on policy distance when learning about candidates who should represent their political positions. The study tests this expectation for the 2008 US presidential election, and finds that for respondents with less consistent self-placements on the liberal-conservative scale, policy distance less strongly affects their voting decision. The results have implications for the quality of political representation, as certain parts of the electorate are expected to be less closely represented.

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“…Another modification to deal with unpredictable voters was suggested by Lauderdale (2010). It is also possible to relax some of the assumptions of the spatial voting model.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring hawks and doves from voting records

Eijffinger

Mahieu

Raes

2018

European Journal of Political Economy

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We analyze revealed policy preferences in monetary policy committees. From the voting records of the Bank of England we estimate the policy preferences with spatial models of voting. We analyze systematic patterns in these policy preferences. We find that internal committee members tend to hold centrist policy preferences while pronounced policy preferences are generally held by external members. Committee members with a career in academia and the industry hold more diverse policy preferences whereas committee members with central bank experience exhibit little heterogeneity in preferences. The median voter does not vary systematically according to career background. Most central banks take monetary policy decisions by committee. Committee in this context is not a well-defined organizational concept but refers loosely to a group of people taking decisions. Differences between committees relate to the decision protocol, the (in)formal hierarchy, the size and to the composition. One key difference is the composition of committees. In this paper we focus on the composition and how the diversity of views are related to and influenced by the composition of the committee. Some committees consist mainly of career central bankers who have extensive experience at the central bank, whereas other committees consist mostly of external members recruited outside of the central bank.Besley, Meads, and Surico (2008) argue that the internal-external dichotomy could matter for at least two reasons. First, the selection procedure for internal and external members is in many cases formally different. Second, career concerns could affect incentives. Externals leave after their terms whereas internal members may be building a further career in central banking. Also the backgrounds of committee members differ. Experience in the financial industry, at an NGO or with the government may influence how these committee members approach monetary policy making. The model we use is unidimensional. The latent dimension on which we classify monetary policy committee members is called a dove-hawk dimension. We present two main results. First we show that internals are not more hawkish than externals (or vice versa). This is related to a debate in the literature on voting at the Bank of England where some researchers claim that internal members tend to be more hawkish whereas other researchers argue that this is not the case. Our results support the latter strand of the literature.1 However, we find that internals tend to have centrist policy preferences whereas as the most pronounced policy preferences (very dovish or very hawkish) are nearly always held by external members.Our second result is that the policy preferences are not systematically influenced by career backgrounds.The median voter does not change substantially when we consider monetary policy committee members with different career backgrounds. However, career backgrounds seem to be related to the heterogeneity in policy preferences. We find less variation in policy prefere...

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Unpredictable Voters in Ideal Point Estimation

Cited by 42 publications

References 26 publications

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

A Matter of Representation: Spatial Voting and Inconsistent Policy Preferences

Inferring hawks and doves from voting records

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