ASSESSING DIFFERENCES IN LEGISLATORS' REVEALED PREFERENCES: A CASE STUDY ON THE 107TH US SENATE

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lofland, Chelsea L.; Rodriguez, Abel; Moser, Scott
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Cruz; University of Nottingham
• 刊物名称: ANNALS OF APPLIED STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1932-6157
• DOI: 10.1214/16-AOAS951
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 456-479
• 关键词: statistical-analysis; party defection; measuring bias; uncertainty; patterns; BAYES; MODEL

摘要

Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators' preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are affected by outside forces such as party pressure, minority status or procedural rules. This paper describes a Bayesian hierarchical model that extends existing spatial voting models to test sharp hypotheses about differences in preferences using posterior probabilities associated with such hypotheses. We use our model to investigate the effect of the change of party majority status during the 107th U.S. Senate on the revealed preferences of senators. This analysis provides evidence that change in party affiliation might affect the revealed preferences of legislators, but provides no evidence about the effect of majority status on the revealed preferences of legislators.