Political Science Publications
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Browsing Political Science Publications by Author "Carroll, Royce"
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Item Recovering a Basic Space from Issue Scales in R(Foundation for Open Access Statistics, 2016) Poole, Keith T.; Lewis, Jeffrey B.; Rosenthal, Howard; Lo, James; Carroll, Roycebasicspace is an R package that conducts Aldrich-McKelvey and Blackbox scaling to recover estimates of the underlying latent dimensions of issue scale data. We illustrate several applications of the package to survey data commonly used in the social sciences. Monte Carlo tests demonstrate that the procedure can recover latent dimensions and reproduce the matrix of responses at moderate levels of error and missing data.Item Shadowing Ministers: Monitoring Partners in Coalition Governments(Sage, 2012) Carroll, Royce; Cox, Gary W.In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to “shadow” the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing their own parties’ interests rather than the coalition’s. Based on data from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the greater the policy disagreement between a minister’s party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed.Item The Role of Party: The Legislative Consequences of Partisan Electoral Competition(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013) Carroll, Royce; Eichorst, JasonWe examine the proposition that incentives for legislative organization can be explained by the nature of electoral competition. We argue that legislators in environments where parties are competitive for majority status are most likely to have delegated power to their leadership to constrain individualistic behavior within their party, which will in turn increase the spatial predictability of individual voting patterns. Using roll call votes and district-level electoral data from the U.S. state legislatures, we show empirically that increased statewide interparty competition corresponds to much more predictable voting behavior overall, while legislators from competitive districts have less predictable behavior.Item The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013) Carroll, Royce; Lewis, Jeffrey B.; Lo, James; Poole, Keith T.; Rosenthal, HowardEmpirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll-call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll-call data sets, we find that legislatorsメ utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal-conservative conflict.