[gov3009-l] Gov 3009 March 12: Desposato

This week's speaker at the Gov 3009 workshop is Scott Desposato from the University of Arizona. He will be speaking on "Correcting for Bias in Roll-Call Cohesion Scores." An abstract is below, and a link to the full paper can be found at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~swd/rb.pdf Abstract: Cohesion scores are a standard measure of legislative behavior and common in legislative studies. Their strengths explain their wide use: cohesion scores are simple, intuitive, and easy to calculate. Perhaps because of this, little attention has been paid to cohesion scores' statistical properties or relationship to existing theories of legislative behavior. In this paper, I show how under a basic random utility model of legislative behavior, cohesion scores suffer a serious bias problem: scores are artificially inflated for small parties and weak parties. This bias challenges a consistent finding in the comparative literature on political parties; that small parties are consistently more disciplined than large parties. I propose an intuitive solution that will eliminate bias for a wide variety of models: making large parties smaller by drawing samples without replacement from them. Seminar Information: The seminar meets at noon in Room 22, Center for Basic Research in Social Sciences (CBRSS, 34 Kirkland St., this is the yellow building across the street from William James Hall). Contact information, previous presentations, and the spring schedule may be found at the course web site: http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~gov3009/. Lunch is provided. To join the gov3009 mailing list, send e-mail to gov3009-l-request(a)fas.harvard.edu with the following text message: subscribe end Questions? Please contact the workshop coordinator, Liz Stuart, at stuart(a)stat.harvard.edu