Where Does the President Stand? Measuring Presidential Ideology

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Treier
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Point ◽  
Revealed Preferences ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Point Estimates

Although estimating the revealed preferences of members of Congress is straightforward, estimating the position of the president relative to Congress is not. Current estimates place the president as considerably more ideologically extreme than one would expect. These estimates, however, are very sensitive to the set of presidential positions used in the roll call analyses for the 103rd through 109th Congresses. The president often obtains more moderate ideal point estimates relative to Congress when including positions based on signing bills into law.

Integrating Voting Theory and Roll Call Analysis: A Framework

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua D. Clinton ◽  
Adam Meirowitz
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Point ◽  
Testing Procedure ◽  
Formal Modeling ◽  
Legislative Politics ◽  
Federal Aid ◽  
Voting Theory ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Legislative Studies ◽  
Point Estimates ◽  
Hypothesis Testing Procedure

Scholars of legislative studies typically use ideal point estimates from scaling procedures to test theories of legislative politics. We contend that theory and methods may be better integrated by directly incorporating maintained and to be tested hypotheses in the statistical model used to estimate legislator preferences. In this view of theory and estimation, formal modeling (1) provides auxiliary assumptions that serve as constraints in the estimation process, and (2) generates testable predictions. The estimation and hypothesis testing procedure uses roll call data to evaluate the validity of theoretically derived to be tested hypotheses in a world where maintained hypotheses are presumed true. We articulate the approach using the language of statistical inference (both frequentist and Bayesian). The approach is demonstrated in analyses of the well-studied Powell amendment to the federal aid-to-education bill in the 84th House and the Compromise of 1790 in the 1st House.

scholarly journals Structured-Induced Deference or Equal and Coordinate Actor: Congressional Influence on American Foreign Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-118
Author(s):  
Eric Paul Svensen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Point Estimates ◽  
Domestic Legislation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Perhaps no separation of powers issue receives as much scholarly attention as the near monopoly modern presidents exert over foreign policy. Yet, despite an extensive literature on the subject, scholars have drawn different conclusions as to the causes of this change, finding that lawmakers either defer to the president or are equal and coordinate actors on foreign policy. Using the separation of powers as a guide, I attempt to rectify these differences and demonstrate instances in the roll call record where examples of both explanations are most evident. Recovering ideal point estimates between the 87th and 112th Congress on votes highlighting competing governmental objectives, findings show that the chamber median frequently shifts toward the president on foreign policy votes in the final passage stage and during the treaty process. However, evidence also shows Congress is less likely to defer to the president on domestic legislation and appropriations.

scholarly journals Joint Representation Learning of Legislator and Legislation for Roll Call Prediction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuqiao Yang ◽  
Xiaoqiang Lin ◽  
Geng Lin ◽  
Zengfeng Huang ◽  
Changjian Jiang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Context Information ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Triplet Loss ◽  
Joint Representation ◽  
Narrative Description ◽  
The Ideal

In this paper, we explore to learn representations of legislation and legislator for the prediction of roll call results. The most popular approach for this topic is named the ideal point model that relies on historical voting information for representation learning of legislators. It largely ignores the context information of the legislative data. We, therefore, propose to incorporate context information to learn dense representations for both legislators and legislation. For legislators, we incorporate relations among them via graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) for their representation learning. For legislation, we utilize its narrative description via recurrent neural networks (RNN) for representation learning. In order to align two kinds of representations in the same vector space, we introduce a triplet loss for the joint training. Experimental results on a self-constructed dataset show the effectiveness of our model for roll call results prediction compared to some state-of-the-art baselines.

scholarly journals Change We Can Believe In? Using Political Science to Predict Policy Change in the Obama Presidency

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (02) ◽  
pp. 329-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Woon
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Congressional Elections ◽  
Congressional Election ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Point Estimates

Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes will be moderate or somewhat to the left of center (rather than far left). Furthermore, the predictions depend as much on partisan polarization and the results of the congressional election as they do on the outcome of presidential election itself.

Monetary Policy Committees and Voting Behavior

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-58
Author(s):  
Sylvester Eijffinger ◽  
Ronald Mahieu ◽  
Louis Raes
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Point Estimates ◽  
Monetary Policy Committees ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Ideal Point Estimation

In this chapter we suggest to use Bayesian ideal point estimation to analyze voting in monetary policy committees. Using data from the Riksbank we demonstrate what this entails and we compare ideal point estimates with the results from traditional approaches. We end by suggesting possible extensions.

Polarized Pluralism: Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1117-1137 ◽  
Author(s):  
JESSE M. CROSSON ◽  
ALEXANDER C. FURNAS ◽  
GEOFFREY M. LORENZ
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Revealed Preferences ◽  
Significant Heterogeneity ◽  
Pressure System ◽  
Organized Interests ◽  
Group System ◽  
American Interest ◽  
Party Differences

For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups’ revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. We generate the scores by jointly scaling a large dataset of interest groups’ positions on congressional bills with roll-call votes on those same bills. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups’ PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like PAC contributions and lobbying influence policymakers’ perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.

Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-NOMINATE Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Royce Carroll ◽  
Jeffrey B. Lewis ◽  
James Lo ◽  
Keith T. Poole ◽  
Howard Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Ideal Point ◽  
Parametric Bootstrap ◽  
Point Estimates ◽  
Measuring Bias

Testing the Predictions of the Multidimensional Spatial Voting Model with Roll Call Data

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gyung-Ho Jeong
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Power ◽  
Empirical Test ◽  
Ideal Point ◽  
Solution Concept ◽  
Point Estimation ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Uncovered Set ◽  
Spatial Voting ◽  
Spatial Voting Model ◽  
Voting Model

This paper develops a procedure for locating proposals and legislators in a multidimensional policy space by applying agenda-constrained ideal point estimation. Placing proposals and legislators on the same scale allows an empirical test of the predictions of the spatial voting model. I illustrate this procedure by testing the predictive power of the uncovered set—a solution concept of the multidimensional spatial voting model—using roll call data from the U.S. Senate. Since empirical tests of the predictive power of the uncovered set have been limited to experimental data, this is the first empirical test of the concept's predictive power using real-world data.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document