Analyzing Roll Calls with Perfect Spatial Voting: France 1946-1958

Abstract

A recent methodological advance in legislative roll-call analysis is especially relevant to the study of legislative behavior outside the setting of the United States Congress. We argue that Poole's (2000) optimal classification method for roll-call analysis is preferable to parametric methods for studying many legislatures. This is because the nature of party discipline, near-perfect spatial voting, and parliamentary institutions that provides incentives for strategic behavior lead to severe violations of the error assumptions underlying parametric methods. The robustness of the nonparametric method to the stochastic nature of the data makes it an ideal candidate for studying strategic behavior in legislatures. We illustrate these points with an analysis of data from the French Fourth Republic (1946–1958).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 175 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.