Estimating Spatial Preferences from Votes and Text
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Author(s)
Kim, In Song
Londregan, John
Ratkovic, Marc
Date Issued
April 2018
Journal
Political Analysis
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Citation
Kim, In Song, John Londregan, and Marc Ratkovic. “Estimating Spatial Preferences from Votes and Text.” Political Analysis 26, no. 02 (April 2018): 210–229.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We introduce a model that extends the standard vote choice model to encompass text. In our model, votes and speech are generated from a common set of underlying preference parameters. We estimate the parameters with a sparse Gaussian copula factor model that estimates the number of latent dimensions, is robust to outliers, and accounts for zero inflation in the data. To illustrate its workings, we apply our estimator to roll call votes and floor speech from recent sessions of the US Senate. We uncover two stable dimensions: one ideological and the other reflecting to Senators' leadership roles. We then show how the method can leverage common speech in order to impute missing data, recovering reliable preference estimates for rank-and-file Senators given only leadership votes.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2018.7
