James Lo

The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting

Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators’ locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll-call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators’ utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll-call data sets, we find that legislators’ utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal-conservative conflict.

Ideological Clarity in Multiparty Competition: A New Measure and Test Using Election Manifestos

Parties in advanced democracies take ideological positions as part of electoral competition, but some parties communicate their position more clearly than others. Existing research on democratic party competition has paid much attention to assessing partisan position taking in electoral manifestos, but it has largely overlooked how manifestos reflect the clarity of these positions. This article presents a scaling procedure that better reflects the data-generating process of party manifestos. This new estimator allows us to recover not only positional estimates, but also estimates for the ideological clarity or ambiguity of parties. The study validates its results using Monte Carlo tests, a manifesto-drafting simulation and a human coding exercise. Finally, the article applies the estimator to party manifestos in four multiparty democracies and demonstrates that ambiguity can enhance the appeal of parties with platforms that become more moderate, and lessen the appeal of parties with platforms that become more extreme.

Reflections on the European integration dimension

The present economic and political state of the European Union (EU) provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the methodological toolkit of political scientists studying European integration. The political events during the first decade of this century have marked an accelerated and increasingly complex integration process. The EU has managed to overcome Cold War divisions between East and West to include an unprecedented number of countries. At the same time, the EU has successfully reformed its institutions through the Treaty of Lisbon after an almost decade-long process full of obstacles. Following this expansion and institutional reform, the EU faces yet another crossroads after a severe European debt crisis has put the future of the common currency, and thereby the future of political and economic integration of Europe, into question. Knowing where political parties stand on Europe is therefore not just a measurement exercise in political science. Party position measures allow researchers to examine important substantive questions, ranging from explaining how party systems across Europe work, how election campaigns are run, or how governments deal with new economic, fiscal, and political challenges. Scholars studying Europe will therefore continue to demand valid and reliable party position estimates on European integration. Any continued effort to produce data for the scholarly community should thus be complimented. Given the prominence of the integration dimension in research on the European Union, we investigate in this forum section how well parties can be distinguished on this dimension. Using data from different sources, including expert surveys, voter surveys, and roll call votes in the European Parliament (EP), we find that

Legislative Responsiveness to Gerrymandering: Evidence from the 2003 Texas Redistricting

Do legislators respond to congressional redistricting? A central tenet of American legislative scholarship over the last 20 years argues that members of Congress maintain consistent ideological positions throughout their tenure, and thus do not generally adapt their voting records to changes in the electoral environment. In contrast, a second literature argues that legislators are predominantly motivated by electoral incentives through an electoral connection, forcing them to adapt to the shifting environment as agents of the electorate. In this research note, I test these competing theories using data from the 2003 Texas redistricting. Despite being treated to a targeted gerrymander subjecting them to extreme electoral pressure, I find little evidence of ideological adaption in the voting records of eight Democrats that were targeted for defeat. My results thus confirm the earlier findings of Poole (2007) and have broader implications for the study of political representation and polarization.

Response to Marks, Steenbergen and Hooghe

We would like to briefly respond to the points raised by Gary Marks, Marco Steenbergen and Liesbet Hooghe (2012), henceforth MSH. The authors focus on the cross-validation of expert survey data, which is only one of several analyses that we perform in our contribution. MSH raise three points: (1) that caution should be used when dichotomizing the dimension as a dependent variable, (2) that the conceptualization of the dimension must be theoretically motivated, and (3) that valuable information in the data should not be thrown out unnecessarily. The examination of the expert scores by MSH reveals that the choice of the subrange can have consequences for reliability tests – a finding we clearly agree with. MSH point out that the division into subranges creates a small-N problem. We acknowledge that the correlation improves if the three additional parties in the middle range are included. That said, the correlation for the middle subrange as defined by MSH is still only about half the size of the overall scale reliability of r1⁄4 .88 between CHES and Benoit and Laver (we keep the original scale orientation by Benoit and Laver). More importantly, the correlation for the vast majority of parties that are pro-European (two-thirds of all parties in the analysis) remains low, with a correlation of r1⁄4 .26. In short, we agree with MSH that one should pay close attention to the definition of the subranges in scale reliability analysis, but we believe our main point is largely unaffected by these relatively minor adjustments. MSH write that we claim that ‘Europe is best conceived as a dichotomous issue’ (Marks et al., 2012). This is not what we proposed. Instead, we show in our analysis that the scale reliability of the European integration dimension is not as high as