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Estimating the locations of voters, politicians, policy outcomes, and status quos on a common scale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2021

James Coleman Battista ,
Michael Peress Open the ORCID record for Michael Peress [Opens in a new window]  and
Jesse Richman
James Coleman Battista
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, NY, USA
Michael Peress*
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University, SUNY, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Jesse Richman
Affiliation:
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: michael.peress@stonybrook.edu
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Abstract

How well are voters represented and what explains how well voters are represented? Answering these questions requires unpacking the mechanisms by which voters choose elected officials and elected officials implement policies. Though spatial theories of voting and legislative bargaining provide a broad framework for understanding these mechanisms, testing these theories involves a measurement problem where multiple political actors and outcomes must be located. We develop a technique for estimating policy outcomes, status quo locations, the ideology of elite political actors, and the ideology of voters, on a common scale. Using our new estimates, we demonstrate a similar level of incongruence for tax policies and spending policies. The incongruence arises for different reasons however—tax policies are over-responsive to the position of the median voter. Contrarily, spending policies are under-responsive and barely correlated with the position of the median voter. In examining the underlying mechanisms for policy change, we find that while the positions of elected officials over-respond to the median voter, the changing composition of state government has little immediate impact on policy. Instead, policy outcomes respond to long-term trends in the composition of government.

Keywords

Ideal point estimation
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 806 - 822
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Battista et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/N0M2XG
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Battista et al. supplementary material

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