The Atlas of Congressional Roll Calls

Predicting Legislative Roll Calls from Text

We develop several predictive models linking legislative sentiment to legislative text. Our models, which draw on ideas from ideal point estimation and topic models, predict voting patterns based on the contents of bills and infer the political leanings of legislators. With supervised topics, we provide an exploratory window into how the language of the law is correlated with political support....

Roll Calls, Party Labels and Elections1

We develop a model of legislative policy-making in which individual legislators are concerned with both policy and re-election. Legislators’ preferences are private information, and they have two means of communicating their preferences to voters. First, they each have a ‘party label’ which credibly identifies an interval within which their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votes m...

Partisanship and Constituency Influences on Congressional Roll-Call Voting Behavior in the US House

This research examines the factors that influence how members of the US House of Representatives vote. Party affiliation of the legislator and constituency interests will be the two main independent variables. The district's constituency characteristics are represented by constituency ideology ('96 Presidential vote for Clinton), percent non-white, region, and the median household education. Th...

The Significance of Roll Calls in Voting Bodies: A Model and Statistical Estimation

Evaluating the 1986 Congressional

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