Competing Logics of Roll Call Request in the European Parliament 1

Simon Hug2, Bjørn Høyland 3

First version: March 2019, this very first version: Mar 1, 2019  
 
Paper prepared for presentation at the General Conference of the
European Political Science Association (Belfast, June, 2019)

Abstract

Assessing what roll call votes can tell us about legislator preferences has proved to be an important conundrum in legislative studies. This is due to two reasons: first, roll call votes are likely to occur for very specific votes in most parliaments, and second, having a roll call vote (i.e., a public record of how a legislator has voted) will influence a legislator's voting behavior. Drawing on a unique dataset comprising all votes from the two chambers of the Swiss parliament, some of which were automatically roll called while for others legislators requested them, we are able to identify the effects of both roll call votes and selecting particular topics for roll call votes. As we also have information on who requested the roll call, we can distinguish among motivations for calling a roll call. We find, based on an extension of the two cut-point IRT model (Clinton, Jackman and Rivers, 2004), that members of the Swiss lower house support more leftist positions when their voting behavior is exposed to scrutiny, compared to situations when their behavior is not visible. In the upper house, however, the left and right are affected differently by the publicity of their voting. Thus, we can demonstrate that inferences drawn from roll call votes, when these do not cover the full universe of voting decisions, lead to biased inferences regarding the ideal-points of legislators.

1  Introduction

Source data EP6 []

Footnotes:

1Research assistance by Girard Bucello and the partial financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 100012-129737) is greatly appreciated.
2  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Faculté des sciences de la société ; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone +41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@unige.ch
3  Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Postbox 1097, Blindern, 0317 Oslo Norway ; phone +4722858598 ; email: bjorn.hoyland@stv.uio.no

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