Understanding Roll Call Vote Requests and their Consequences

Simon Hug¹
Département de science politique, Université de Genève

Oct 27, 2011

2 Scientific Information

2.1 Summary

Analyses of roll call votes have developed to form a mainstay of parliamentary research. By their development both in terms of methods used as in substantive (and geographic) areas covered, more and more researchers have become aware that in many instances roll call votes only give us a partial glimpse at parliamentary behavior. The reason for this is that in many parliaments roll call votes need to be requested or occur only on particular proposals. Based on this observation the proposed project wishes to address the following overarching research question:

Under what circumstances are roll call votes requested in national parliaments and how do these circumstances affect our inferences on parliamentary behavior based on roll call votes?

To answer this research question the project is based on three interdependent goals. The first goal is to establish a detailed inventory of the institutional rules under which roll call votes occur in all national parliaments around the world. To achieve this goal an internet-based survey will be carried out among experts of the various national parliaments following the lead example of a recent handbook.

Based on this inventory an existing theoretical model will be expanded to consider different motivations for making roll call requests, namely the disciplining of party members, the signaling of party positions and the shaming of other parties for their voting behavior. This theoretical model will allow for a more precise assessment of the relationship between observed voting behavior in parliaments through roll call votes and unobserved behavior in secret (or voice votes).

The implications of this theoretical model will be submitted to empirical tests, which forms the third goal. More specifically the empirical tests envision to study the consequences that the different rules and reasons for requesting roll call votes have on empirical analyses based on roll call votes. These empirical tests should also allow for insights how the results from roll call votes analyses have to be corrected for, given that they are based on only a (non-random) sample of all votes in most parliaments.

Detailed project description

Ideal point estimates for the Swiss lower house

Relevant publications and working papers

Bütikofer, Sarah and Simon Hug. Strategic behavior in parliament. Journal of Legislative Studies (forthcoming)
Carrubba, Clifford J., Matthew Gabel Simon Hug. 2008a. ``Legislative Voting Behavior, Seen and Unseen: Adjusting for Selection Effects in Roll Call Vote Analysis.'' Legislative Studies Quarterly 33:543-572.
Carrubba, Clifford J., Matthew Gabel Simon Hug. 2008b. ``Voting at the surface. Roll call votes in the European Parliament.'' Paper prepared for presentation at the 2nd Conference on the Political Economy of International Organizations January 29-31, 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland.
Hug, Simon. 2010a. ``Selection Effects in Roll Call Votes.'' British Journal of Political Science (2010) 40(1) 225-235.
Hug, Simon. 2010b. Strategic voting in a bicameral setting. In Reform processes and policy change: Veto players and decision-making in modern democracies, ed. Thomas König, George Tsebelis Marc Debus. Berlin: Springer, pp. 231-246.
Hug, Simon 2011. Roll call votes in the European parliament. Paper prepared for presentation at the ECPR General Conference University of Iceland, Reykjavik (August 25 - 27, 2011) (abstract) (paper)
Hug, Simon 2012a Parliamentary voting. in Wolfgang C. Müller and Hanne Marthe Narud, (eds.) Party Governance and Party Democracy. (2013) Springer, pp. 137-157
Hug, Simon 2012b. What's in a vote? Paper prepared for presentation at the 5th Conference on The Political Economy of International Organizations, Villanova, January, 2012 (abstract) (paper)
Hug, Simon 2012c. The European Parliament after Lisbon (and before). Paper prepared for presentation at the International Conference on\\``Beyond Lisbon Treaty: Re-examining EU Institutions and Governance'' (Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS), Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, September 7-8, 2012) (abstract) (paper soon to come)
Hug, Simon and Richard Lukacs (2014) Preferences or blocs? Voting in United Nation's Human Rights Council Review of International Organizations 9(1): 83-106.
Hug, Simon and Danielle Martin. 2011. Constituency preferences and MP preferences: the electoral connection Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meething of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago (April, 2011) (abstract) (paper)
Hug, Simon and Danielle Martin. 2012. ``How electoral systems affect MPs' positions.'' Electoral Studies 31:192-200
Hug, Simon Pascal Sciarini. 2009. Parties and their success in the Swiss parliament. In Demokratie als Leidenschaft, ed. Adrian Vatter, Fréderic Varone Fritz Sager. Bern: Haupt pp. 117-138.
Hug, Simon and Simone Wegmann (2013) Ten years in the United Nations: Where does Switzerland stand? Swiss Political Science Review 19(2): 212-232.
Hug, Simon, Simone Wegmann, and Reto Wuest 2012. Parliamentary voting procedures in comparison. Paper prepared for presentation at the EPSA Conference, Berlin (June, 2012) (abstract) (paper)
Hug, Simon and Reto Wuest 2012. Ideological positions of party switchers. Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago (April 12 - 15, 2012) (abstract) (paper)
Traber, Denise, Simon Hug Pascal Sciarini. 2014. Party Unity in the Swiss Parliament. The Electoral Connection (abstract) Journal of Legislative Studies (forthcoming)