IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v58y2014i3p754-771.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin E. Lauderdale
  • Tom S. Clark

Abstract

Item response theory models for roll‐call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which those votes are about common issues. We demonstrate our approach with votes and opinion texts from the U.S. Supreme Court, using latent Dirichlet allocation to discover the extent to which different issues were at stake in different cases and estimating justice preferences within each of those issues. This approach can be applied using a variety of unsupervised and supervised topic models for text, community detection models for networks, or any other tool capable of generating discrete or mixture categorization of subject matter from relevant vote‐specific metadata.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin E. Lauderdale & Tom S. Clark, 2014. "Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 58(3), pages 754-771, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:58:y:2014:i:3:p:754-771
    DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12085
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12085
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ajps.12085?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bonica, Adam & Chilton, Adam S. & Sen, Maya, 2015. "The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers," Working Paper Series 15-049, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    2. Keith Carlson & Michael A. Livermore & Daniel N. Rockmore, 2020. "The Problem of Data Bias in the Pool of Published U.S. Appellate Court Opinions," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 17(2), pages 224-261, June.
    3. Bonica, Adam & Sen, Maya, 2017. "The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Introduce Ideology into Judicial Selection," Working Paper Series rwp17-048, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    4. Spruk, Rok & Kovac, Mitja, 2019. "Replicating and extending Martin-Quinn scores," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    5. Hausladen, Carina I. & Schubert, Marcel H. & Ash, Elliott, 2020. "Text classification of ideological direction in judicial opinions," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    6. Sylvester Eijffinger & Ronald Mahieu & Louis Raes, 2016. "Monetary Policy Committees, Voting Behavior and Ideal Points," BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers 1628, BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:58:y:2014:i:3:p:754-771. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.