TY - JOUR
T1 - Identifying intraparty voting blocs in the U.K. House of Commons
AU - Spirling, Arthur
AU - Quinn, Kevin
N1 - Funding Information:
Arthur Spirling is Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138 (E-mail: aspirling@gov. harvard.edu). Kevin Quinn is Professor of Law, University of California Berkeley, School of Law, Berkeley, CA 94720-7200 (E-mail: [email protected]). This work has benefited from helpful comments from panel participants at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, the 2005 Political Methodology Summer Meeting, and the 2005 Joint Statistical Meetings as well as seminar participants at Stanford University and Washington University. Quinn’s research is supported by National Science Foundation grants SES 03-50613 and BCS 05-27513. Two referees and an Associate Editor provided very thorough comments that improved the content and structure of our paper. We are indebted to the Editor for his helpful advice and assistance.
PY - 2010/6
Y1 - 2010/6
N2 - Legislative voting records are an important source of information about legislator preferences, intraparty cohesiveness, and the divisiveness of various policy issues. Standard methods of analyzing a legislative voting record tend to have serious drawbacks when applied to legislatures, such as the United Kingdom House of Commons, that feature highly disciplined parties, strategic voting, and large amounts of missing data.We present a method (based on a Dirichlet process mixture model) for analyzing such voting records that does not suffer from these same problems. Our method is model-based and thus allows one to make probability statements about quantities of interest. It allows one to estimate the number of voting blocs within a party or any other group of members of parliament (MPs). Finally, it can be used as both a predictive model and an exploratory model. We illustrate these points through an application of the method to the voting records of Labour Party MPs in the 1997-2001 session of the U.K. House of Commons.
AB - Legislative voting records are an important source of information about legislator preferences, intraparty cohesiveness, and the divisiveness of various policy issues. Standard methods of analyzing a legislative voting record tend to have serious drawbacks when applied to legislatures, such as the United Kingdom House of Commons, that feature highly disciplined parties, strategic voting, and large amounts of missing data.We present a method (based on a Dirichlet process mixture model) for analyzing such voting records that does not suffer from these same problems. Our method is model-based and thus allows one to make probability statements about quantities of interest. It allows one to estimate the number of voting blocs within a party or any other group of members of parliament (MPs). Finally, it can be used as both a predictive model and an exploratory model. We illustrate these points through an application of the method to the voting records of Labour Party MPs in the 1997-2001 session of the U.K. House of Commons.
KW - Dirichlet process mixture models
KW - Political science
KW - Roll call data
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U2 - 10.1198/jasa.2009.ap07115
DO - 10.1198/jasa.2009.ap07115
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:78649423253
SN - 0162-1459
VL - 105
SP - 447
EP - 457
JO - Journal of the American Statistical Association
JF - Journal of the American Statistical Association
IS - 490
ER -