Showing papers on "NOMINATE published in 1999"
TL;DR: In this paper, a political-economic history of roll call voting in the United States is presented, based on an analysis of the first 100 Congresses and is devoted to showing that important episodes in American political and economic history can be better understood by supplementing or reinterpreting more traditional analyses with the basic space theory of ideology.
Abstract: This paper updates Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. Congress is based largely on an analysis of the first 100 Congresses and is devoted to showing that important episodes in American political and economic history can be better understood by supplementing or reinterpreting more traditional analyses with the basic space theory of ideology. Ideology was measured by D NOMINATE scores. Here we update some of our findings using new estimations that are complete through the end of the 105th Congress. We find that the trend to polarization and unidimensionality that we identified in Congress has continued unabated through the 105th Congress. The shift to Republican control after the 1994 elections is part of this trend and does not represent a sharp break in roll call voting behavior. Comparison of NOMINATE results for the United States to those for other parliaments indicates the ideological character of roll call voting in Congress.
259 citations
TL;DR: This paper showed that agnostic spatial models that simultaneously attempt to estimate legislators' preferred points and ideological locations for the proposals on which they vote, such as the well-known NOMINATE model of Poole and Rosenthal, are not identified.
Abstract: This paper shows that agnostic spatial models that simultaneously attempt to estimate legislators' preferred points and ideological locations for the proposals on which they vote, such as the well-known NOMINATE model of Poole and Rosenthal, are not identified The problem arises because the agnostic estimators inherit the granularity of the voting data and, so, cannot recapture the underlying continuous parameter space I propose an alternative estimator that achieves identification by modeling the agenda
179 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined 76 "killer" amendments considered during the 103d and 104th Congresses, and found that successful killer amendments and identifiable strategic voting are extremely rare.
Abstract: For more than three decades, social choice theorists and legislative scholars have studied how legislative outcomes in Congress can be manipulated through strategic amendments and voting. I address the central limitation of this research, a virtual absence of systematic empirical work, by examining 76 “killer” amendments considered during the 103d and 104th congresses. I trace the effects of these amendments on their related bills using archival sources, test for strategic voting using NOMINATE as the baseline measure of legislator preferences across a range of issues, and explore with OLS regression why some killer amendments are more strategically important than others. The findings indicate that successful killer amendments and identifiable strategic voting are extremely rare. In none of the cases examined could the defeat of a bill be attributed to adoption of an alleged killer amendment.
49 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, shareholders can gain effective control over their firm's management by voting to choose an outside agency to nominate candidate candidates, which would give the board and management a greater incentive to serve the owners' interests.
Abstract: Shareholders can gain effective control over their firm's management by voting to choose an outside agency to nominate director candidates. This would give the board and management a greater incentive to serve the owners' interests, resulting in higher productivity of capital, more realistic levels of executive pay, less short-termism, and a moderation of the corporate bloat that tends to necessitate drastic cuts. Such a system would further improve corporate governance in western countries, and provide a much needed "quick fix" for governance problems in Asia.
15 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors develop a two-stage game to investigate how to implement the first best response to common supply shocks via a multilateral institution, whose board of directors is composed of a representative per each member country.
Abstract: . We study a world economy where worldwide policy coordination is essential to optimally stabilize unfavorable common supply shocks. We develop a two-stage game to investigate how to implement the first-best response to these shocks via a multilateral institution, whose board of directors is composed of a representative per each member country. In a first stage, national governments nominate their representatives on the board. In a second stage, the board collectively chooses stabilization policies. We compare the relative merits of two collective choice mechanisms - bargaining and majority voting - in avoiding manipulation of the cooperative agreement through the strategic nomination of national representatives.
1 citations