Gender Turnover and Roll Call Voting in the US Senate

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the ‘true majority’ . If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the ‘true majority’ prevails. It is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders), with multiple necessary majorities (European Union decision-making), or even more general rules. Simultaneous voting in the general model has more differentiated results.

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Estimating Spatial Preferences from Votes and Text

Political Analysis ◽

10.1017/pan.2018.7 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 26 (2) ◽

pp. 210-229 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

In Song Kim ◽

John Londregan ◽

Marc Ratkovic

Keyword(s):

Factor Model ◽

Choice Model ◽

Vote Choice ◽

The Other ◽

Gaussian Copula ◽

Leadership Roles ◽

Roll Call ◽

The Us ◽

Us Senate ◽

Reliable Preference

We introduce a model that extends the standard vote choice model to encompass text. In our model, votes and speech are generated from a common set of underlying preference parameters. We estimate the parameters with a sparse Gaussian copula factor model that estimates the number of latent dimensions, is robust to outliers, and accounts for zero inflation in the data. To illustrate its workings, we apply our estimator to roll call votes and floor speech from recent sessions of the US Senate. We uncover two stable dimensions: one ideological and the other reflecting to Senators’ leadership roles. We then show how the method can leverage common speech in order to impute missing data, recovering reliable preference estimates for rank-and-file Senators given only leadership votes.

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The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s0003055419000315 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 113 (4) ◽

pp. 917-940 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

JEFFREY R. LAX ◽

JUSTIN H. PHILLIPS ◽

ADAM ZELIZER

Keyword(s):

Public Opinion ◽

Recent Work ◽

Lower Income ◽

Roll Call ◽

The Poor ◽

The Us ◽

The Rich ◽

Us Senate ◽

Do So

Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion—partisan biases in responsiveness—has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so using 49 Senate roll-call votes from 2001 to 2015. We find that affluent influence is overstated and itself contingent on partisanship—party trumps the purse when senators have to take sides. The poor get what they want more often from Democrats. The rich get what they want more often from Republicans, but only if Republican constituents side with the rich. Thus, partisanship induces, shapes, and constrains affluent influence.

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Factor analysis versus multi-dimensional scaling: binary choice roll-call voting and the US Supreme Court

Social Networks ◽

10.1016/s0378-8733(02)00004-7 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 24 (3) ◽

pp. 201-229 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

Timothy J. Brazill ◽

Bernard Grofman

Keyword(s):

Factor Analysis ◽

Supreme Court ◽

Binary Choice ◽

Roll Call ◽

Roll Call Voting ◽

Dimensional Scaling ◽

The Us ◽

Us Supreme Court ◽

Multi Dimensional Scaling

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Long-Term Consequences of Election Results

British Journal of Political Science ◽

10.1017/s0007123415000241 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 351-372 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Anthony Fowler ◽

Andrew B. Hall

Keyword(s):

Regression Discontinuity ◽

State Legislatures ◽

Regression Discontinuity Design ◽

Roll Call ◽

The Us ◽

Long Term Consequences ◽

Election Results ◽

Us Senate ◽

Over Time

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.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780190865580.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Justin Buchler

Keyword(s):

Spatial Model ◽

Spatial Models ◽

Spatial Theory ◽

Roll Call ◽

Policy Space ◽

Policy Decisions ◽

Roll Call Voting ◽

Legislative Session ◽

History Of ◽

Conventional Models

Spatial theory is divided between models of elections and models of roll call voting, neither of which alone can explain congressional polarization. This chapter discusses the history of spatial theory, why it is important to link the two strands of spatial models, and the value of reversing the order of conventional models. Conventional models place an election before policy decisions are made. This chapter proposes a unified spatial model of Congress in which the conventional order is reversed. First, there is a legislative session, then an election in which voters respond retrospectively, not to the locations candidates claim to hold, but to the bundles of roll call votes that incumbents cast to incrementally adopt their locations in the policy space. Such a model is best suited to explaining three puzzles: why do legislators adopt extreme positions, how do they win, and what role do parties play in the process?

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