Strategic roll call vote requests1

Fang-Yi Chiou  
IPSAS, Academia Sinica 
 
Bjorn Hoyland Chiou  
University of Oslo 
 
Simon Hug  
Département de science politique et relations internationales
Université de Genève
 
Paper prepared for presentation at the General Conference of the
European Political Science Association (Milano, June 2017)

Abstract

Roll call vote analyses used to infer ideal-points of legislators or the cohesiveness of parties all implicitly assume that the data-generating process leading to such votes is random and does not affect MPs' behavior. If roll call votes, however, are requested by party leaders or MPs, this assumption is unlikely to hold. Strategic considerations by the actors requesting roll calls are likely to influence the inferences we wish to make based on observed voting behaviors by legislators. To address this issue we propose a strategic estimator for roll call vote requests and apply it to data on roll call vote requests from several parliaments. We find that strategic considerations play a considerable role in roll call vote requests.


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On 8 Dec 2014, 12:39.