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We use bill cosponsorship and roll-call vote data to compare legislators' revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal-component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House...
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Context 1
... alternative approach we propose builds on social-network analysis. Rather than estimating parameters for each individual bill, social-network analysis commonly constructs an affiliation matrix (Table 2), with each cell indicating the number of times that each pair of legislators cosponsor legislation together. We do not use the original (two-mode) dataset, organized as an X = r × c matrix, with r = 1, 2 . . . ...
Context 2
... this affiliation matrix, the diagonal elements describe the total number of projects sponsored by each legislator and the off-diagonal elements describe the number of times that each pair of legislators cosponsors bills together. Table 2 provides the first ten rows and ten columns of an affiliation matrix for the 104th U.S. House. The table shows that there are very significant differ- ences in the total amount of legislation sponsored by each legislator, as well as noteworthy variations in the amount of legislation cospon- sored by each pair of legislators. ...
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... 9 Since we are interested in how extreme the position of each deputy is irrespective of the main dimension that orders voting in the Chamber, we transform the positive and negative values into absolute ones. Thus, followingAlemán et al. (2009) andHarden and Kirkland (2018), the indicator measures how far the legislator's ideal point is from the plenary median.Following the organizational explanation, we expect the probability of switching to increase for senior legislators compared to rookies. Legislative reelection rate in Argentina is low: 77 per cent of deputies elected between 1983 and 2017 (including alternate representatives) served only one term in office (as established by Clerici 2020). ...
Why do legislators switch their votes between the committee and floor stages in multiparty presidential systems? The literature on the US Congress has argued that switches are conditional on cross‐cutting pressures by competing principals (i.e., party leaders and interest groups), partisanship, electoral competitiveness, ideology, seniority, and informational updates. This article argues that unlike in the US two‐party system, in multiparty systems electoral competitiveness increases the likelihood of switching. Additionally, the practice of switching is more likely for legislators whose competing principals are leaders with conflicting electoral interests. We test these hypotheses analyzing vote switches between committee reports and roll‐call votes in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. Our results indicate that legislative vote switching indeed behaves differently in multiparty than in a two‐party presidential system.
