Please join us this Wednesday, December 3rd when Michael Peress, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, will be presenting, "Estimating Proposal and Status Quo Locations Using Voting and Cosponsorship Data". Michael provided the following abstract,
Theories of lawmaking generate predictions for the policy outcome as a function of the
status quo. These theories are difficult to test because existing ideal point estimation techniques
do not recover the locations of proposals or status quos. Instead, such techniques only recover
cutpoints. This limitation has meant that existing tests of theories of lawmaking have been
indirect in nature. I propose a method of directly measuring ideal points, proposal locations, and
status quo locations on the same multidimensional scale, by employing a combination of voting
data, bill and amendment cosponsorship data, and the congressional record. My approach works
as follows. First, we can identify the locations of legislative proposals (bills and amendments) on
the same scale as voter ideal points by jointly scaling voting and cosponsorship data. Next, we
can identify the location of the final form of the bill using the location of last successful
amendment (which we already know). If the bill was not amended, then the final form is simply
the original bill location. Finally, we can identify the status quo point by employing the cutpoint
we get from scaling the final passage vote. To implement this procedure, I automatically coded
data on the congressional record available from
www.thomas.gov. I apply this approach to recent
sessions of the U.S. Senate, and use it to test the implications of competing theories of
lawmaking.
A copy of the paper is available here:
The applied statistics workshop meets at 12 noon in room K-354, CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St) with a light lunch. Presentations start at 1215 pm and usually end around 130 pm. As always, all are welcome and please email me with any questions.
Cheers
Justin Grimmer