Policy and the structure of roll call voting in the US house
| Autor: | Spencer Dorsey, Scott de Marchi, Michael J. Ensley |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Topic model
021110 strategic defence & security studies Public Administration media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences 0211 other engineering and technologies Legislation 02 engineering and technology House of Representatives Management Monitoring Policy and Law 0506 political science Competition (economics) Politics NOMINATE Political science Voting 050602 political science & public administration Predictive power Law and economics media_common |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Public Policy. 41:384-408 |
| ISSN: | 1469-7815 0143-814X |
| Popis: | Competition in the US Congress has been characterised along a single, left-right ideological dimension. We challenge this characterisation by showing that the content of legislation has far more predictive power than alternative measures, most notably legislators’ ideological positions derived from scaling roll call votes. Using a machine learning approach, we identify a topic model for final passage votes in the 111th through the 113th House of Representatives and conduct out-of-sample tests to evaluate the predictive power of bill topics relative to other measures. We find that bill topics and congressional committees are important for predicting roll call votes but that other variables, including member ideology, lack predictive power. These findings raise serious doubts about the claim that congressional politics can be boiled down to competition along a single left-right continuum and shed new light on the debate about levels of polarisation in Congress. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|