This paper presents a software package designed to estimate Poole and Rosenthal W-NOMINATE scores in R. The package uses a logistic regression model to analyze political choice data, usually (though not exclusively) from a legislative setting. In contrast to other scaling methods, W-NOMINATE...

An important, but largely unexplored, class of bargaining problems involve two negotiators, who send signals to a third party. Such problems are especially common in politics, where elected officials must worry about approval from voters and sovereign leaders in international negotiations must...

The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual legislators have been a key contributor to this success (Poole and Rosenthal 1997;...

In earlier work, we created Congressional common space scores for multiple state legislatures using bridge actors who served in both institutions. Here, we employ simulations to explore the general issues involved in bridging institutions in data-sparse environments, where only a few bridge...

Using new data on roll-call voting of U.S. state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. So-called "moderate'' districts that switch hands between parties are often internally...

Over the several decades, observers of American politics have noted the sharp increase in partisanship and ideological polarization among members of Congress. While better ideological differentiation may provide voters clearer choices and increase accountability, the results of recent partisan...

This paper examines trends in the procedural fiscal performance of Congress and the president. It evaluates several hypotheses about why the regular order in Congressional budgeting and appropriations has fallen into disuse. While the question has many angles and dimensions, I consider three...

Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to non-members as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints,...

Income inequality and political polarization have both increased dramatically in the United States over the last several decades. A small but growing literature has suggested that these two phenomena may be related and mutually reinforcing: income inequality leads to political polarization, and...

Models of agenda-setting are central to the positive analysis of political institutions. Elaborations of the classical agenda setting model of Romer and Rosenthal (1978) have long been used to make predictions about policy outcomes and the distribution of influence among different political...