Collaborative Research on Dynamic Models of Roll Call Voting

公众和媒体通常将美国国会和其他立法机构的议员称为“自由派”和“保守派”。这个项目的根本关注点是提供对自由/保守主义的准确衡量。由于我们在20世纪80年代开发了提名比例算法，政治学家和经济学家在数十种专业出版物中使用了我们对国会的测量，并将我们的算法用作其他数十个立法机构的测量技术，从美国的州立法机构到外国议会再到联合国大会。在美国政治史教学和美国政治入门课程中经常使用这种测量方法。该项目提高了国会测量的准确性，并更新了当前的数据库。此外，对其他立法机构的研究表明，支持提名的决策模式并不总是延伸到其他立法机构。左翼和右翼(或自由主义和保守主义)的偏好可能比国会中的定义更明确。弃权，以及是和否，可能是一个有意义的选择。该项目还提供了评估方法的工作，允许对立法行为采取更一般的方法。我们工作的一个独特特点是，它的动态特征允许比较自由/保守随着时间的推移。例如，其他人使用这些测量方法来研究奴隶制作为19世纪国会政治中的一个问题的演变，以及贯穿整个美国历史的贸易立法，包括互惠关税和快车道。这一动态特性允许我们处理具有时间依赖偏好的模型，以及用于大规模计算的超级计算技术。

The public and the media commonly refer to members of the United States Congress and other legislatures as "liberals" and "conservatives". The fundamental concern of this project is to provide accurate measurement of liberal/conservatism. As a result of our development of the NOMINATE scaling algorithm in the 1980s, political scientists and economists have used our measurements of Congress in scores of professional publications and used our algorithms as measurement techniques for dozens of other legislatures, ranging from state legislatures in the United States to foreign parliaments to the United Nations General Assembly. The measurements are frequently used in teaching American political history and in introductory courses on American politics.This project increased the accuracy of measurement for Congress and updated the database current. Moreover, the work on other legislatures has suggested that the decision-making model that underpins NOMINATE does not always extend to other legislatures. Left-right (or liberal-conservative) preferences may be more sharply defined than in Congress. Abstention, as well as Yea and Nay, may be a meaningful choice. The project also provided work on estimation methods that allow for a more general approach to legislative behavior.A unique feature of our work is that its dynamic feature permits comparisons of liberal/conservatism over time. For example, others have used these measurements to study the evolution of slavery as an issue in congressional politics in the nineteenth century and trade legislation, including reciprocal tariffs and fast track, throughout American history. This dynamic feature allows us to work on models with time-dependent preferences and on supercomputing techniques for large-scale computation.