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Scaling Roll Call Votes with wnominate in R

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  • Poole, Keith
  • Lewis, Jeffrey B.
  • Lo, James
  • Carroll, Royce

Abstract

This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE explicitly assumes probabilistic voting based on a spatial utility function, where the parameters of the utility function and the spatial coordinates of the legislators and the votes can all be estimated on the basis of observed voting behavior. Building on software written by Poole in Fortran, the new wnominate package in R facilitates easier data input and manipulation, generates bootstrapped standard errors, and includes a new suite of graphics functions to display the results. We demonstrate the functionality of this package by conducting a natural experiment using roll calls -- an experiment which is greatly simplified by the data manipulation capabilities of the wnominate package in R.

Suggested Citation

  • Poole, Keith & Lewis, Jeffrey B. & Lo, James & Carroll, Royce, 2011. "Scaling Roll Call Votes with wnominate in R," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 42(i14).
    • Handle: RePEc:jss:jstsof:v:042:i14
    DOI: http://hdl.handle.net/10.18637/jss.v042.i14
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Enelow,James M. & Hinich,Melvin J., 1984. "The Spatial Theory of Voting," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521275156.
    2. Clinton, Joshua & Jackman, Simon & Rivers, Douglas, 2004. "The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call Data," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 98(2), pages 355-370, May.
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    Cited by:

    1. repec:jss:jstsof:42:i01 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Evans, Gary, 2014. "Analyzing Spatial Models of Choice and Judgment with R," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 58(b01).
    3. Thomas Lehner & Fabio Wasserfallen, 2019. "Political conflict in the reform of the Eurozone," European Union Politics, , vol. 20(1), pages 45-64, March.
    4. Auffenberg, Jennie & Marcinkiewicz, Kamil, 2013. "Wer gestaltet, wer verwaltet Reformen im öffentlichen Dienst? Ein Methodenvergleich zur Analyse von Arbeitsbeziehungen in Reformprozessen anhand der Polizei Brandenburg," TranState Working Papers 170, University of Bremen, Collaborative Research Center 597: Transformations of the State.
    5. Poole, Keith T. & Lewis, Jeffrey B. & Rosenthal, Howard & Lo, James & Carroll, Royce, 2016. "Recovering a Basic Space from Issue Scales in R," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 69(i07).
    6. repec:jss:jstsof:42:i02 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Paula Clerici, 2021. "Legislative Territorialization: The Impact of a Decentralized Party System on Individual Legislative Behavior in Argentina," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 51(1), pages 104-130.
    8. Reza Mousavi & Bin Gu, 2019. "The Impact of Twitter Adoption on Lawmakers’ Voting Orientations," Service Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(1), pages 133-153, March.
    9. James Lo, 2018. "Dynamic ideal point estimation for the European Parliament, 1980–2009," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 176(1), pages 229-246, July.
    10. Richard F. Potthoff, 2018. "Estimating Ideal Points from Roll-Call Data: Explore Principal Components Analysis, Especially for More Than One Dimension?," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-27, January.
    11. Christopher Hare & Keith T. Poole, 2015. "Measuring ideology in Congress," Chapters, in: Jac C. Heckelman & Nicholas R. Miller (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Voting, chapter 18, pages 327-346, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Adam S. Chilton & Mila Versteeg, 2015. "The Failure of Constitutional Torture Prohibitions," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 44(2), pages 417-452.
    13. Sven-Oliver Proksch & James Lo, 2012. "Reflections on the European integration dimension," European Union Politics, , vol. 13(2), pages 317-333, June.
    14. Cloléry, Héloïse, 2023. "Legislators in the crossfire: Strategic non-voting and the effect of transparency," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    15. repec:jss:jstsof:42:i09 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Monika Mühlböck & Nikoleta Yordanova, 2017. "When legislators choose not to decide: Abstentions in the European Parliament," European Union Politics, , vol. 18(2), pages 323-336, June.

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