Legislative Voting Behavior, Seen and Unseen: A Theory of Roll-Call Vote Selection

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLIFFORD CARRUBBA ◽  
MATTHEW GABEL ◽  
SIMON HUG
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Roll Call Vote ◽  
Legislative Voting

Off the Record: Unrecorded Legislative Votes, Selection Bias and Roll-Call Vote Analysis

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLIFFORD J. CARRUBBA ◽  
MATTHEW GABEL ◽  
LACEY MURRAH ◽  
RYAN CLOUGH ◽  
ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Random Sample ◽  
Selection Bias ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
General Study ◽  
Roll Call Vote ◽  
Legislative Voting ◽  
Sampling Problem ◽  
The Universe

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.

scholarly journals Candidacy Eligibility Criteria and Party Unity

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (8) ◽  
pp. 1298-1325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Rehmert
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Selection Methods ◽  
Roll Call Vote ◽  
Eligibility Criteria ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Legislative Voting ◽  
Industrial Democracies ◽  
Formal Requirements

Extant research suggests that candidate selection methods can be consequential for party unity in legislative voting. Yet thus far, only variations in the selectorate and the degree of centralization have been examined. This article argues that Candidacy Eligibility Criteria (CEC), too, have implications for party unity. I theorize that with stricter formal requirements, parties avoid adverse selection and ensure the nomination of committed candidates. By using roll-call vote data from 16 industrial democracies, candidate surveys and an original data set consisting of nearly 500 historical party constitutions, I show that parties demanding prior membership and nudging aspirants to maintain networks within the party tend to be more unified in parliamentary voting. Moreover, their candidates, too, express greater loyalty when compared with parties without formal CEC. Thus, this article contributes to the literatures on party unity and on candidate selection by showing how certain party rules, hitherto neglected, affect party unity.

scholarly journals Public Opinion and Public Policy in Advanced Democracies

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wlezien
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Government

The representation of public opinion in public policy is of obvious importance in representative democracies. While public opinion is important in all political systems, it is especially true where voters elect politicians; after all, opinion representation is a primary justification for representative democracy. Not surprisingly, a lot of research addresses the connection between the public and the government. Much of the work considers “descriptive representation”—whether the partisan and demographic characteristics of elected politicians match the characteristics of the electorate itself. This descriptive representation is important but may not produce actual “substantive representation” of preferences in policy. Other work examines the positions of policymakers. Some of this research assesses the roll call voting behavior of politicians and institutions. The expressed positions and voting behavior of political actors do relate to policy but are not the same things. Fortunately, a good amount of research analyzes policy. With but a handful of exceptions noted below, this research focuses on expressed preferences of the public, not their “interests.” That is, virtually all scholars let people be the judges of their own interests, and they assess the representation of expressed opinion no matter how contrary to self-interest it may seem.

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

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.

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

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 773-825 ◽  
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.

Libertarian Motivations on the Vinson Court

1953 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-336
Author(s):  
C. Herman Pritchett
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Senate ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Legislative Voting ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Devil

Justice Frankfurter is fond of quoting an old English saying that “the devil himself knoweth not the mind of men.” The mind of a man who happens to be a judge is the center of many contending impulses when he is making it up, and an external reconstruction of the process is quite impossible. However, the rules of the game require that judges supply clues to their thought processes in the form of written opinions. In every major case decided by the Supreme Court, one or more of its members provide a written justification for the decision announced. The individualistic tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, moreover, permits justices who do not agree with the views of their brethren to say so, and to give their reasons for dissenting. Thus the Supreme Court on decision day takes on the aspect of a small legislature in which votes are cast pro and con on significant issues of public policy, with accompanying explanations much more coherent and systematic and better-reasoned than are customarily available in explanation of votes cast, say, in the United States Senate.While it has not been usual to do so, these judicial votes can be subjected to the same kinds of analysis as have been traditionally employed for the study of legislative voting behavior.

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