JSM 2005 - Toronto

Abstract #302556

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Legend: = Applied Session, = Theme Session, = Presenter
Activity Number: 81
Type: Invited
Date/Time: Monday, August 8, 2005 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: IMS
Abstract - #302556
Title: Recovering Ideological Information from Divisions of the UK House of Commons
Author(s): Kevin Quinn*+ and Arthur Spirling
Companies: Harvard University and University of Rochester
Address: 34 Kirkland St. , Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Keywords: Item Response Theory ; Markov Chain Monte Carlo ; Parliamentary Data
Abstract:

Political scientists often make use of item response theory models to extract information about legislator ideology from legislative voting records. While these methods work well in many cases, they perform extremely poorly when used to infer the ideological positions of members of the UK House of Commons. In this paper, we show that institutional features of Westminster systems are inconsistent with the assumptions underlying standard measurement models. We go on to develop novel models that perform much better on voting data generated by Westminster systems and present results that inform our understanding of ideological changes in the Labour party over the past 20 years.

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