Working Papers
Academic Year 2004-2005
Conference on Legislative Behavior

Animation: A Tool for Understanding the Dynamics of Legislatures, ( 226kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 1
Howard Rosenthal, Brown University and Princeton University
February 15, 2005

Do the dynamics of behavior in a legislature indicate political stability or, on the contrary, portend instability, even armed conflict? Are the members of a legislature in fixed ideological positions, necessitating that political chance occur as a result of the selection of new representatives through the political process. Or do legislators adapt to the changing demands of their constituents? How do new legislatures, like the United States Congress in 1789, the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, and the European Parliament in 1979 organize themselves politically? How is a legislature affected by a massive change in membership, as has occurred with the recent enlargement of the EU? How does behavior of new legislators develop in an ongoing legislature? How do legislatures respond to increasing political tension on a variety of issues ranging from slavery to abortion? This essay focuses on the use of animation in addressing these and other questions.
A picture is worth 1000 words. A moving picture can be worth 1000 time series regressions. This paper is particularly concerned with moving pictures that are animations of time-series estimates of the dynamics of behavior in voting bodies. The empirical focus is the European Parliament, the United States Congress, and the United Nations General Assembly. Animations of these legislatures can be viewed at voteworld.berkeley.edu.

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Political Institutions, Competing Principals, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting (320kb. pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 2
John Carey, Dartmouth College
August 11, 2004

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. To varying degrees, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. I present a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions, and test the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 17 different countries.
Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intra-party competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting. The results support the competing principals account of party voting in legislatures.

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Dimension of Politics in the European Parliament (322 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 3
Simon Hix, London School of Economics and Political Science
Abdul Noury, Universite Libre de Bruxelles
Gerard Roland, University of California, Berkeley and CEPR

We investigate the dimensionality of political conflict in the European Parliament by applying scaling method techniques to all roll-call votes between 1979 and 2001 in the European Parliament. Contrary to most existing studies using scaling methods, we are able to interpret the substantive content of the observed dimensions using exogenous measures of national party policy positions. We find that the main dimension of politics in the EU’s only elected institution is the classic left-right dimension found in domestic politics. A second dimension is also present, although to a lesser extent, which is explained by conflicts between the parties in ‘government’ in the EU Council and Commission and the parties in ‘opposition’ in the Parliament.

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Bedfellow Politics: The Effects of Institutional Checks of Preferences and Policy (268 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 4
William B. Heller, Binghamton University
February 2005

Political institutions define the allocation of decision-making authority among officeholders. Institutional position is empowering, but the preferences of each actor thus empowered also constrain what others can achieve. I argue that the combination of institutional prerogative and preference-imposed constraints gives policy makers incentives to adapt their priorities (and thus their revealed preferences) to both institutional structures and the preferences and priorities of other policy makers. Officeholders who must cooperate to make policy will invest resources and suffer losses, both to help counterparts they agree with to hold on to office and to make it more difficult to do so for counterparts with whom they do not agree. My argument rests on the assumptions that a) political actors have policy goals, but they can achieve their goals only if others in the policy process support them; and b) political actors compete for and retain power by working for the benefit of those who put them in office. When decision-making authority is split among several actors, decision makers are motivated not only to take each other’s preferences into account, but also to tailor proposals to help (or hinder) each other’s ability to retain office.

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Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (648 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 5
Nolan McCarty, Princeton University
February 2005

The fundamental transformation of American politics can be summed up by the recent history of a single Senate seat. In 1991, Pennsylvania's three-term senator John Heinz was killed in a light plane accident. A Republican, he compiled a moderate record as his party's leading supporter of environmental and labor union causes. In the special election that followed, the Republicans ran another relatively moderate candidate, Richard Thornburgh a former governor and US attorney general, against Harris Wofford, the interim senator. Wofford, who began his career as the first associate director of the Peace Corps, was significantly more liberal than Heinz or Thornburgh was conservative. In a campaign orchestrated by the then relatively unknown James Carville, Wofford ran a platform of fundamental reform of the U.S. Healthcare system. This electoral strategy was wildly successful as Thornburgh was beaten easily and healthcare became the "hot" issue going into the 1992 presidential elections.

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Legislator Preferences, Ideal Points, and the Spatial Model in the European Parliament (822 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 6
Erik Voeten, George Washington University
February 2005

Analyses of roll call votes claim that the European Parliament is increasingly becoming a 'normal' parliament in which transnational party groups compete in a low-dimensional ideological space dominated by the classic socio-economic left-right conflict. This paper assesses the validity of this claim by comparing roll-call voting behavior in the European Parliament against preferences of legislators as expressed in the 1996 Members of European Parliament Survey. The results corroborate that low-dimensional ideological competition drives the behavior of parliamentarians to a substantial degree. The individual ideological convictions of parliamentarians are an important independent source of their voting behavior. Moreover, there is no evidence that gatekeeping institutions artificially suppress one or more important dimensions of policy contestation. Finally, European party groups are indeed effective in swaying legislators towards their ideal points. Previous research has, however, overstated the importance of socio- economic conflict to the detriment of value-based libertarian-traditional contestation.

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Randomized Experiments from Non-random Selection in U.S. House Elections (525 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 7
David S. Lee, Department of Economics, UC Berkeley and NBER
January 2005

This paper establishes the relatively weak conditions under which causal inferences from a regression-discontinuity (RD) analysis can be as credible as those from a randomized experiment, and hence under which the validity of the RD design can be tested by examining whether or not there is a discontinuity in any pre-determined (or "baseline") variables at the RD threshold. Specifically, consider a standard treatment evaluation problem in which treatment is assigned to an individual if and only if V > v0, but where v0 is a known threshold, and V is observable. V can depend on the individual's characteristics and choices, but there is also a random chance element: for each individual, there exists a well-defined probability distribution for V. The density function - allowed to differ arbitrarily across the population - is assumed to be continuous. It is formally established that treatment status here is as good as randomized in a local neighborhood of V = v0. These ideas are illustrated in an analysis of U.S. House elections, where the inherent uncertainty in the final vote count is plausible, which would imply that the party that wins is essentially randomized among elections decided by a narrow margin. The evidence is consistent with this prediction, which is then used to generate "near-experimental" causal estimates of the electoral advantage to incumbency.

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Electoral Performance and Voting Behavior (312 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 8
Abdul Noury, Universite Libre de Bruxelles
February 2005

In this paper we study the voting behavior of the Czech Parliament members. First, we show that low-dimensionality characterizes conflict in the Czech Parliament. The first, and dominant dimension is the classical left-right dimension, whereas the second dimension, when significant, expresses attitude toward European integration. Second, we document the party development in the Czech Parliament and show evidence of convergence to a Western European type parliamentary democracy. We show that this is mainly a result of political parties' use of reward and punishment strategies to discipline their members. Highly disciplined members were awarded with better ranking in the party list for the subsequent elections. We also find that the electors are, though indirectly, interested in roll call voting behavior of their representatives.

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Gatekeeping (248 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 9
Christophe Crombez, University of Leuven
Tim Groseclose, University of California Los Angeles
Keith Krehbiel, Stanford University
February 21, 2005

Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rules that determine who may exercise procedural rights,and in what order. This paper analyzes several two-stage decision-making models,focusing on one in which the first- moving actor has a unique, unilateral, procedural right to enforce the status quo, i.e., to exercise gatekeeping. Normative analysis using Pareto-dominance criteria reveals that the institution of gatekeeping is inferior to another institutional arrangement within this framework - namely,one in which the same actor is given a traditional veto instead of a gatekeeping right.The analytical results raise an empirical puzzle: When and why would self-organizing collective choice bodies adopt gatekeeping institutions? A qualitative survey of governmental institutions suggests that -contrary to an entrenched modeling norm within political science -empirical instances of codified gatekeeping rights are rare or nonexistent.

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Urgencies, Gate Keeping, and Agenda Control in the Chilean Congress (136 kb .pdf file)
CIG Working Paper No. 10
Cristobal Aninat, Universidad Adlofo Ibenez
John Londregan, Princeton University
March 9, 2005

Standard models of agenda control focus on the ability of agenda setters and veto players to in uence the content of proposals. Much less attention is given to the in uence of agenda control and gate keeping power on the speed with which bills travel through a legislature. The truly dynamic aspects of formal models of politics tend to focus on costly signaling, in which delay sends a costly signal about an actors type. This is a central aspect to Tsebelis and Money (1997) in their study of intercameral bargaining, which appeals to the bargaining model of Rubinstein (1982). It is also key to the analysis by Wawro and Schickler (2004) of Senate libusters, which invokes the game theoretic literature on "wars of attrition" (see for example Fudenberg and Tirole (1986)).

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