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Dimensions in Congressional Voting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Kenneth Koford
Affiliation:
University of Delaware

Abstract

While dimensional studies of congressional voting find a single, ideological dimension, regression estimates find several constituency and party dimensions in addition to ideology. I rescale several unidimensional studies to show their increased classification success over the null hypothesis that votes are not unidimensional. Several null hypotheses are explored. With these null hypotheses, 66%–75% of nonunidimensional roll call votes are nevertheless correctly classified by one dimension. After the rescaling, one dimension succeeds in correctly classifying 25%–50% of the votes, and second and third dimensions are important.

Type
Research Note
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1989

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