Collaborative: Using Roll Call Votes to Understand Legislative Behavior

在大多数民主国家，国家和地方议会立法投票的公开记录是对当选官员问责的重要依据。在政治科学中，这些记录也是研究立法者和政党行为的重要数据来源。在实践中，许多立法机构只对发生投票的一小部分问题建立了个别立法者投票的公共记录。这些记录的选票往往不是所有投票的代表性样本，可能表现出对政治问责制和政治行为科学产生影响的系统性偏见。因此，了解接受公开记录投票（唱名表决）的问题的特征，对于我们理解民主进程和评估从唱名数据中得出的科学推论的局限性至关重要。这项研究将通过对世界各国议会机构的考察，增进我们对投票记录的理解。目前在政治科学中，有两种来自不同政治动机的说法，作为对进行记录投票的决定的有争议的解释的基础：纪律论点和立场论点。本研究(a)发展了关于这些帐户的含义的理论，并就哪些问题需要投票以及对立法者的可观察投票模式的后果提出了可检验的命题；(b)在对政策领域和立法发起人进行记录投票的全体投票中审查政策领域和立法发起人；(c)审查决定进行记录或不记录表决的问题的正式规则和政治背景；(d)生成并估计统计模型，这些模型说明了预期结果对请求进行记录投票的决定的影响。在这样做的过程中，这项研究比迄今为止的政治科学对唱名投票数据产生过程有了更深入的了解，这反过来又可以从观察到的投票行为中得出更有力的推论。这项研究是第一次系统地了解多个国家议会的唱名表决数据生成过程。这项研究将促进我们对民主表达、问责制和响应性的理解。此外，它将提供大量关于议会投票的数据，这对比较立法政治领域的学者来说是重要的。最后，该项目将为研究生提供宝贵的研究经验。

In most democracies, the public record of legislative votes in national and local parliaments is an important basis for holding elected officials accountable. In political science, that record is also an important source of data on legislator and party behavior. In practice, many legislatures create a public record of the votes cast by individual legislators for only a fraction of the issues on which votes occur. These recorded votes often are not a representative sample of all votes cast and may exhibit systematic biases that have implications for political accountability and for the science of political behavior. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of the issues that receive a publicly recorded vote (a roll-call vote) is essential to our understanding of democratic processes and evaluating the limits of scientific inferences that can be drawn from roll-call data. This study will advance our understanding of the voting record through examination of national parliamentary bodies around the world.Currently in political science, two accounts, derived from alternative political motivations, serve as the basis of contending explanations of the decision to conduct a recorded vote: disciplining arguments and position-taking arguments. This study (a) develops theory about the implications of these accounts and specifies testable propositions about both what issues come to a vote and what are the consequences for legislators' observable voting patterns; (b) examines the policy domains and legislative sponsors in the full population of votes to the policy domains and legislative sponsors subject to recorded votes; (c) examines the formal rules and political context that condition the issues that receive a recorded or unrecorded vote; and (d) generates and estimates statistical models that account for the effect of expected outcomes on the decision to request a recorded vote. In doing so, the study provides a deeper understanding of the roll-call vote data generating process than political science has had to date, which, in turn, will allow stronger inferences to be drawn from observed voting behavior.This study is the first systematic effort to understand the roll-call vote data generating process for multiple national parliaments. The study will advance our understanding of democratic presentation, accountability, and responsiveness. In addition, it will provide a large corpus of data on parliamentary voting that will be important to scholars in the field of comparative legislative politics. Finally, the project will provide graduate students with invaluable research experience.