Voting chart of resolutions adopted by recorded or roll-call vote

Scholars often use roll-call votes to study legislative behaviour. However, many legislatures only conclude a minority of decisions by roll call. Thus, if these votes are not a random sample of the universe of votes cast, scholars may be drawing misleading inferences. In fact, theories over why roll-call votes are requested would predict selection bias based on exactly the characteristics of legislative voting that scholars have most heavily studied. This article demonstrates the character and severity of this sampling problem empirically by examining European Parliament vote data for a whole year. Given that many legislatures decided only a fraction of their legislation by roll call, these findings have potentially important implications for the general study of legislative behaviour.

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Voting chart of resolutions adopted by recorded or roll-call vote

Index to Proceedings of the General Assembly 2018/2019 - Index to Proceedings of the General Assembly ◽

10.18356/1718c214-en ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 238-254

Author(s):

Keyword(s):

Roll Call ◽

Roll Call Vote

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Voting chart of resolutions adopted by recorded or roll-call vote

Index to Proceedings of the General Assembly - Index to Proceedings of the General Assembly 2013/2014 ◽

10.18356/841dccd0-en ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 256-266

Author(s):

Keyword(s):

Roll Call ◽

Roll Call Vote

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Roll-Call Vote Selection: Implications for the Study of Legislative Politics

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s0003055420000192 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 114 (3) ◽

pp. 691-706

Author(s):

CAITLIN AINSLEY ◽

CLIFFORD J. CARRUBBA ◽

BRIAN F. CRISP ◽

BETUL DEMIRKAYA ◽

MATTHEW J. GABEL ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Formal Model ◽

Legislative Behavior ◽

Legislative Politics ◽

Roll Call ◽

Roll Call Vote ◽

Voting Procedures ◽

Strategic Incentives ◽

Theoretical Results ◽

Representative Samples ◽

Quantities Of Interest

Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest. However, the usefulness of the roll-call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent. After laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll-call record is important, we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers, finding that roll calls are typically discretionary. We then consider two arguments for discounting the potential problem: (a) roll calls are ubiquitous, especially where the threshold for invoking them is low or (b) the strategic incentives behind requests are sufficiently benign so as to generate representative samples. We address the first defense with novel empirical evidence regarding roll-call prevalence and the second with an original formal model of the position-taking argument for roll-call vote requests. Both our empirical and theoretical results confirm that inattention to vote method selection should broadly be considered an issue for the study of legislative behavior.

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What Motivates an Oligarchic Elite to Democratize? Evidence from the Roll Call Vote on the Great Reform Act of 1832

The Journal of Economic History ◽

10.1017/s0022050719000342 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 79 (3) ◽

pp. 773-825 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Toke S. Aidt ◽

Raphaël Franck

Keyword(s):

Public Opinion ◽

Great Britain ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Roll Call ◽

House Of Commons ◽

Roll Call Vote ◽

Members Of Parliament

AbstractThe Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of democratization: public opinion, political expedience, and threat of revolution. Peaceful agitation and mass-support for reform played an important role. Political expedience also motivated some members of Parliament to support the reform, especially if they were elected in constituencies located in counties that would gain seats. Violent unrest in urban but not in rural areas had some influence on the members of Parliament. Counterfactual scenarios suggest that the reform bill would not have obtained a majority in the House of Commons in the absence of these factors.

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The temporal dimension of issue competition

Party Politics ◽

10.1177/1354068817693474 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 24 (6) ◽

pp. 708-718 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Valentin Schröder ◽

Christian Stecker

Keyword(s):

Comparative Analysis ◽

Roll Call ◽

Public Attention ◽

Roll Call Vote ◽

Temporal Dimension ◽

Data Set ◽

German State ◽

Tit For Tat ◽

Party Strength ◽

Issue Competition

Existing accounts of issue competition have focused on content: What issues do parties choose to compete with. We complement this literature with an account of parties’ choices on when to compete. Conceiving of the object of competition – public attention – as a common-pool resource, we explain the timing of party attempts at acquiring issues as an interdependent process. Outside of election times, parties coordinate their attempts along a tit-for-tat logic. Within election times, they raise rates of their attempts, rendering coordination futile. This especially concerns opposition parties. We test our hypotheses with a novel data set on roll call vote (RCV) requests in the 16 German state parliaments. These parliaments lend themselves to comparative analysis since they are nearly identical in institutional features and political positions of parties, yet diverse as concerns party strength and government participation at any point in time. The data set covers all 4849 RCVs held in 16.968 plenary sessions in the period 1947–2011.

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Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same-sex Marriage

German Economic Review ◽

10.1111/geer.12183 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (4) ◽

pp. e600-e617 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Björn Kauder ◽

Niklas Potrafke

Keyword(s):

Strong Predictor ◽

Roll Call ◽

Same Sex ◽

Roll Call Vote ◽

Same Sex Marriage ◽

Percentage Points ◽

Previous Election ◽

German Parliament

Abstract We examine whether conservative politicians are less likely to support same-sex marriage when they run for office in safe rather than in contested districts using new data based on a roll-call vote in the national German parliament. The results show that the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous election was a strong predictor for supporting same-sex marriage. When the majority increased by a 1 percentage point, the likelihood of voting in favour of same-sex marriage decreased by around 1.3 percentage points. We conjecture that politicians are election-motivated - even when submitting roll-call votes on a matter of conscience.

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Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks

Political Analysis ◽

10.1093/pan/mpl002 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 14 (4) ◽

pp. 456-487 ◽

Cited By ~ 232

Author(s):

James H. Fowler

Keyword(s):

Large Scale ◽

Vote Choice ◽

Roll Call ◽

Eigenvector Centrality ◽

Roll Call Vote ◽

Large Scale Network ◽

The Social ◽

Scale Network ◽

Legislative Influence ◽

The U.S

Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networks of all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S. House and Senate from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directional link can be drawn from each cosponsor of a piece of legislation to its sponsor. I use a number of statistics to describe these networks such as the quantity of legislation sponsored and cosponsored by each legislator, the number of legislators cosponsoring each piece of legislation, the total number of legislators who have cosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and network measures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality. I then introduce a new measure I call “connectedness” which uses information about the frequency of cosponsorship and the number of cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about the social distance between legislators. Connectedness predicts which members will pass more amendments on the floor, a measure that is commonly used as a proxy for legislative influence. It also predicts roll call vote choice even after controlling for ideology and partisanship.

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