Roll Call Data and Ideal Points

Tasos Kalandrakis

No WP42, Wallis Working Papers from University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy

Abstract: We show that, in the absence of symmetry or other parametric restrictions on legislators’ utility functions, roll call voting records cannot be used to estimate legislators’ ideal points unless we complement these data with information on the location of the alternatives being voted upon by the legislature. Without such additional information, the roll-call data cannot differentiate between distinct, arbitrary, sets of ideal points for the legislators no matter how large the roll call record or how low the number of policy dimensions. On the other hand, when the location of voting alternatives is known, we derive simple testable restrictions on the location of legislators’ ideal points from the roll call data.

Keywords: Ideal Point Estimation; Rationalizable Choice; Roll Call Voting Record. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2006-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wallis.rochester.edu/WallisPapers/wallis_42.pdf full text (application/pdf)
None

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:roc:wallis:wp42

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Wallis Working Papers from University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy University of Rochester, Wallis Institute, Harkness 109B Rochester, New York 14627 U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Richard DiSalvo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).