Related papers: Assessing differences in legislators' revealed pre…
Spatial voting models of legislators' preferences are used in political science to test theories about their voting behavior. These models posit that legislators' ideologies as well as the ideologies reflected in votes for and against a…
We develop a new class of spatial voting models for binary preference data that can accommodate both monotonic and non-monotonic response functions, and are more flexible than alternative "unfolding" models previously introduced in the…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
This study presents a Bayesian spatial voting analysis of the Colombian Senate during the 2006-2010 legislative period, leveraging a newly constructed roll-call dataset comprising 147 senators and 136 plenary votes. We estimate legislators'…
We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group…
Predicting how Congressional legislators will vote is important for understanding their past and future behavior. However, previous work on roll-call prediction has been limited to single session settings, thus did not consider…
This paper applies Bayesian methodologies to characterize the legislative behavior of the Colombian Senate during the period 2010-2014. The analysis is carried out through the plenary roll call votes of this legislative chamber. In…
Motivated by the increasing interest of the control community towards social sciences and the study of opinion formation and belief systems, in this paper we address the problem of exploiting voting data for inferring the underlying…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
How could LLMs influence our democracy? We investigate LLMs' political leanings and the potential influence of LLMs on voters by conducting multiple experiments in a U.S. presidential election context. Through a voting simulation, we first…
Using lobbying data from OpenSecrets.org, we offer several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict if a piece of legislation (US bill) has been subjected to lobbying activities or not. We also investigate the influence…
When can an interest group exploit polarization between political parties to its advantage? Building upon Battaglini and Patacchini (2018), we study a model where an interest group credibly promises payments to legislators conditional on…
In this paper, a Bayesian spatial voting model is applied for the first time to characterize the legislative behavior of the Senate of the Republic of Colombia for the period 2006-2010. The analysis is carried out based on the plenary…
The increasing digitization of political speech has opened the door to studying a new dimension of political behavior using text analysis. This work investigates the value of word-level statistical data from the US Congressional…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on…
This paper develops a framework to study the statistical power of revealed-preference tests. With randomly sampled budgets and mild smoothness of demand, statistical learning implies that any model consistent with the data must approximate…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
Understanding the dependence structure between response variables is an important component in the analysis of correlated multivariate data. This article focuses on modeling dependence structures in multivariate binary data, motivated by a…
The use of statistical modeling in baseball has received substantial attention recently in both the media and academic community. We focus on a relatively under-explored topic: the use of statistical models for the analysis of fielding…
While lobbying has been demonstrated to have an important effect on public opinion and policy making, existing models of opinion formation do not specifically include its effect. In this work we introduce a new model of lobbying-driven…