Dear Applied Statistics Workshop Community,
Our next meeting of the spring semester will be on January 31 (12:00 EST).
Sooahn Shin presents "Measuring Issue Specific Ideal Points from Roll Call
Votes."
<When>
January 31, 12:00 to 1:30 PM, EST
Lunch will be available for pick-up inside CGIS K354.
<Where>
In-person: CGIS K354
Zoom:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/93217566507?pwd=elBwYjRJcWhlVE5teE1VNDZoUXdjQT09
<Abstract>
Ideal points are widely used to measure the ideology and policy preferences
of political actors, from voters and politicians to sovereign states. Yet,
the lingering challenge is to measure ideal points specific to a single
issue area. Scholars who wish to measure preferences in a specific area of
interest often resort to subsetting the voting data, resulting in the loss
of valuable information and rendering ambiguous comparisons across
different issue areas. To address this, I introduce IssueIRT — a
hierarchical Item Response Theory (IRT) model that estimates an
issue-specific axis representing a continuum extending from left to right
positions on the issue using roll-call votes and their issue labels. This
approach first estimates multidimensional ideal points using all available
voting data, which are then projected onto issue-specific axes to generate
single-dimensional, issue-specific ideal points. Furthermore, I develop a
measure of issue similarity to compare the alignment of different issue
areas on a unified left-to-right spectrum. I demonstrate that IssueIRT
effectively captures issue-specific voting behaviors through simulations
and a validation study that measures sectionalism in the US House of
Representatives during the 1890s gold standard era. Finally, I show that
polarization in Congress has markedly increased across 32 separate issues
from 1979 to 2023. IssueIRT is implemented in issueirt, an open-source R
package.
<2023-2024 Schedule>
GOV 3009 Website:
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009
Calendar:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=Y18zdjkzcGF2OWZqa2tsZHJidTlzbm…
Best,
Jialu
--
Jialu Li
Department of Government
Harvard University
jialu_li(a)g.harvard.edu