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Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-NOMINATE Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Royce Carroll ,
Jeffrey B. Lewis ,
James Lo ,
Keith T. Poole  and
Howard Rosenthal
Royce Carroll
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, MS 24, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892
Jeffrey B. Lewis
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California—Los Angeles, Bunche Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095
James Lo*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California—Los Angeles, Bunche Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095
Keith T. Poole
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Social Sciences Building, Room 301, 9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0521, University of California—San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521
Howard Rosenthal
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Corwin Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540
*
e-mail: jameslo@ucla.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

DW-NOMINATE scores for the U.S. Congress are widely used measures of legislators' ideological locations over time. These scores have been used in a large number of studies in political science and closely related fields. In this paper, we extend the work of Lewis and Poole (2004) on the parametric bootstrap to DW-NOMINATE and obtain standard errors for the legislator ideal points. These standard errors are in the range of 1%–4% of the range of DW-NOMINATE coordinates.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Summer 2009 , pp. 261 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We thank the National Science Foundation, Rice University, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center for their support. Replication materials are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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