SNYDER, James M., Jr
Estimating paty influence on Roll Call Voting : regression coeficients versus classification success - 2001
Contrary to the claims of McCarty, Poole, And Rosenthal, our methods does not estimate the ideal points of moderates significantly less accurately than the ideal points of extremists. This is true for at least two reason: (1) there is significant randomness in voting ; as a consequence, on a lopsided vote moderates often vote with the extremists; and (2) our data set includes some roll calls that require a supermajority for passage; for thee we define a 50 -50 roll call as lopsided. We also show that the classification-sucess mehtod of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal severely understates the presence of party influence. Furthermore, we show that a proper interpretation of some of their results reveals a significant amount of party influence in Congress
Estimating paty influence on Roll Call Voting : regression coeficients versus classification success - 2001
Contrary to the claims of McCarty, Poole, And Rosenthal, our methods does not estimate the ideal points of moderates significantly less accurately than the ideal points of extremists. This is true for at least two reason: (1) there is significant randomness in voting ; as a consequence, on a lopsided vote moderates often vote with the extremists; and (2) our data set includes some roll calls that require a supermajority for passage; for thee we define a 50 -50 roll call as lopsided. We also show that the classification-sucess mehtod of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal severely understates the presence of party influence. Furthermore, we show that a proper interpretation of some of their results reveals a significant amount of party influence in Congress
