NOMINATE

Abstract: For more than twenty years Michael F. Holt has been considered one of the leading specialists in the political history of the United States. Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln is a collection of some of his more important shorter studies on the politics of nineteenth-century America.The collection focuses on the mass political parties that emerged in the 1820s and their role in broader political developments from that decade to 1865. Holt includes essays on the Democratic, Antimasonic, Whig, and Know Nothing parties, as well as one on Abraham Lincoln's relationship with the congressional wing of the Republican party during the Civil War. Almost all essays touch on the broad question of the role of partisan politics in explaining the outbreak of the war. Individual essays address the following questions as well: What explains the birth and death of powerful third parties? What was the relationship among economic conditions, party performance in office (especially legislative performance), and the mobilization of an unprecedented number of voters between 1836 and 1840? Why did the Whigs find it necessary to nominate military hero Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate in 1848? What explains the death of the Whig party? What role did ethnoreligious issues and the Know Nothing party play in the realignment of the 1850s and the ultimate triumph of the Republican party? In what ways did the continuation of two-party competition after 1860 help the North win the Civil War? Most of the essays have been published previously over a twenty-year span, but there are also two new pieces. ""The Mysterious Disappearance of the American Whig party,"" originally delivered as the Commonwealth Fund Lecture at University College London in February, 1990, seeks to explain why the Whig party died in the 1850s. This essay contrasts the fate of the Whig party with the fates of the Republican party in the 1930s and 1970s and the British Conservative party in the 1840s and 1850s - parties that survived similar, indeed graver, challenges than those to which the Whigs succumbed. In addition, Holt has written and excellent introduction in which he explains how he came to write the essays and reflects upon them in light of the current state of political history as a discipline. Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln offers provocative insights into both the history of nineteenth-century politics and the way it is studied.

Abstract: Fifteenth-century Scotland was a very violent society. To understand the mentalite of fifteenth-century Scotland, historians have naturally emphasised the nationalism of Wyntoun and Bower. Historians of Scotland have tried to demonstrate the success of the kingdom in terms of contemporary experience. The nature of Scottish political society highlights sharply an issue obscured by more 'developed' societies: that in the end, successful rule is a political and not a constitutional matter. Fifteenth-century Scotland provides us with the paradox of exceedingly tough and effective kings ruling a decentralised kingdom, in which to an increasingly unusual degree local power could be exercised without challenge. Scotland was the first kingdom to receive formal recognition of the right of the crown to nominate to the greater benefices. No doubt Scotland had this distinction because the Papacy was more willing to give to the less important kingdom; but that was hardly a relevant consideration to the Scots.

Abstract: Carroll et al. (2009) summarize the similarities and differences between the NOMINATE and IDEAL methods of fitting spatial voting models to binary roll-call data. As those authors note, for the class of problems with which either NOMINATE and the Bayesian quadratic-normal model can be used, the ideal point estimates almost always coincide, and when they do not, the discrepancy is due to the somewhat arbitrary identification and computational constraints imposed by each method. There are, however, many problems for which the Bayesian quadratic-normal model can be easily generalized, so as to address a broad array of questions and take advantage of additional data. Given the nature and source of the differences between NOMINATE and the Bayesian approach—as well as the fact that both approaches are approximations of the decision-making processes being modeled—we believe that it is preferable to choose the more flexible Bayesian approach.

Abstract: This research note addresses an increasingly popular topic in the EU literature, namely the measurement of policy preferences in the Council of Ministers. It aims to provide conclusions on three issues: (1) what data are in fact available from the Council, (2) how preferences are measured in other legislatures, and (3) whether these methods would be suitable for analyses of Council members' preference positions given the available data. Applying the popular scaling method NOMINATE and a Bayesian MCMC model to a data set consisting of all legislation adopted by the Council in 1999—2004, it is found that, although the two methods show similar voting patterns at the general level, the failure to report standard errors by NOMINATE in particular proves to be a severe problem when trying to identify individual governments' policy location. Conversely, the Bayesian approach provides a convincing method for analyses of Council decision records and is easily extended to include more advanced empirical information than merely the governments' decisions to support or oppose a proposal.