Strategic Roll Call Vote Requests

• In Event: Legislative Voting Unity: Ideology and Discipline

Abstract

Roll call vote analyses used to infer ideal-points of legislators or
the cohesiveness of parties all implicitly assume that the
data-generating process leading to such votes is random and does not
affect MPs' behavior. If roll call votes, however, are requested by
party leaders or MPs, this assumption is unlikely to hold. Strategic
considerations by the actors requesting roll calls are likely to
influence the inferences we wish to make based on observed voting
behaviors by legislators. To address this issue we propose a strategic
estimator for roll call vote requests and apply it to data on roll
call vote requests from several parliaments.
We find that strategic considerations play a considerable role
in roll call vote requests.

Authors

• Fang-Yi Chiou, Academia Sinica

• Bjorn Hoyland, University of Oslo

• Simon Hug, University of Geneva