Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate
Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators’ preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are affected by outside forces such as party pressure, minority s...
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| Format: | Article |
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Institute of Mathematical Statistics
2017
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43788/ |
| _version_ | 1848796768927481856 |
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| author | Lofland, Chelsea L. Rodríguez, Abel Moser, Scott |
| author_facet | Lofland, Chelsea L. Rodríguez, Abel Moser, Scott |
| author_sort | Lofland, Chelsea L. |
| building | Nottingham Research Data Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators’ preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are affected by outside forces such as party pressure, minority status or procedural rules. This paper describes a Bayesian hierarchical model that extends existing spatial voting models to test sharp hypotheses about differences in preferences using posterior probabilities associated with such hypotheses. We use our model to investigate the effect of the change of party majority status during the 107th U.S. Senate on the revealed preferences of senators. This analysis provides evidence that change in party affiliation might affect the revealed preferences of legislators, but provides no evidence about the effect of majority status on the revealed preferences of legislators. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T19:53:14Z |
| format | Article |
| id | nottingham-43788 |
| institution | University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T19:53:14Z |
| publishDate | 2017 |
| publisher | Institute of Mathematical Statistics |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | nottingham-437882020-05-04T18:41:13Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43788/ Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate Lofland, Chelsea L. Rodríguez, Abel Moser, Scott Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators’ preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are affected by outside forces such as party pressure, minority status or procedural rules. This paper describes a Bayesian hierarchical model that extends existing spatial voting models to test sharp hypotheses about differences in preferences using posterior probabilities associated with such hypotheses. We use our model to investigate the effect of the change of party majority status during the 107th U.S. Senate on the revealed preferences of senators. This analysis provides evidence that change in party affiliation might affect the revealed preferences of legislators, but provides no evidence about the effect of majority status on the revealed preferences of legislators. Institute of Mathematical Statistics 2017-04-08 Article PeerReviewed Lofland, Chelsea L., Rodríguez, Abel and Moser, Scott (2017) Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate. Annals of Applied Statistics, 11 (1). pp. 456-479. ISSN 1941-7330 Spatial voting model Hypothesis testing Spike-and-slab prior Revealed preferences Factor analysis http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1491616888 doi:10.1214/16-AOAS951 doi:10.1214/16-AOAS951 |
| spellingShingle | Spatial voting model Hypothesis testing Spike-and-slab prior Revealed preferences Factor analysis Lofland, Chelsea L. Rodríguez, Abel Moser, Scott Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate |
| title | Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate |
| title_full | Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate |
| title_fullStr | Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate |
| title_full_unstemmed | Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate |
| title_short | Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate |
| title_sort | assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th u.s. senate |
| topic | Spatial voting model Hypothesis testing Spike-and-slab prior Revealed preferences Factor analysis |
| url | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43788/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43788/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/43788/ |