Related papers: Spatial analysis of U.S. Supreme Court 5-to-4 deci…
We use the United States Supreme Court as an illuminative context in which to discuss three different spatial voting preference models: an instance of the widely used single-peaked preferences, and two models that are more novel in which…
Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a…
The US Supreme Court throughout the 20th century has been characterized as being divided between liberals and conservatives, suggesting that justices with similar ideologies would have voted similarly had they overlapped in tenure. What if…
The Supreme Court's federal preemption decisions are notoriously unpredictable. Traditional left-right voting alignments break down in the face of competing ideological pulls. The breakdown of predictable voting blocs leaves the business…
Latent factor models are widely used in the social and behavioral science as scaling tools to map discrete multivariate outcomes into low dimensional, continuous scales. In political science, dynamic versions of classical factor models have…
We propose a new version of the spatial model of voting. Platforms of five parties are evolving in a two-dimensional landscape of political issues so as to get maximal numbers of voters. For a Gaussian landscape the evolution leads to 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…
This article starts by introducing a new theoretical framework to model spatial systems which is obtained from the framework of interacting particle systems by replacing the traditional graphical structure that defines the network of…
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 build simple models for the distribution of voting patterns in a group, using the Supreme Court of the United States as an example. The least structured, or maximum entropy, model that is consistent with the observed pairwise…
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'…
In legal decisions, split votes (SV) occur when judges cannot reach a unanimous decision, posing a difficulty for lawyers who must navigate diverse legal arguments and opinions. In high-stakes domains, understanding the alignment of…
We consider spatial voting where candidates are located in the Euclidean $d$-dimensional space, and each voter ranks candidates based on their distance from the voter's ideal point. We explore the case where information about the location…
Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an…
We give conditions for equilibria in the following Voronoi game on the discrete hypercube. Two players position themselves in $\{0,1\}^d$ and each receives payoff equal to the measure (under some probability distribution) of their Voronoi…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
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…