DW-NOMINATE scores for the U.S. Congress are widely used measures of legislators' ideological locations over time. These scores have been used in a large number of studies in political science and closely related fields. In this paper we extend the work of Lewis and Poole (2004) on the...

Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the US Congress and legislative behavior more generally (see, for example,...

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...

This study examines the effect of changes in domestic sources of leader support and domestic political institutions on patterns of UN voting. We argue that foreign policy change is most likely when a new leader comes to power who relies on a different core set of societal interests for support...

This paper examines conditions under which parties in parliamentary government establish dominance over the legislative process. We focus on two aspects of this dominance: negative agenda control and legislative success. We argue that the logic of organizing a legislature for majority control is...

poLCA is a software package for the estimation of latent class and latent class regression models for polytomous outcome variables, implemented in the R statistical computing environment. Both models can be called using a single simple command line. The basic latent class model is a finite...

In this paper we show how to apply Bayesian methods to noisy ratio scale distances for both the classical similarities problem as well as the unfolding problem. Bayesian methods produce essentially the same point estimates as the classical methods but are superior in that they provide more...

This paper addresses a concern often faced by social scientists who study subgroups within a given population, as they are frequently limited in the scope and breadth of their research questions due the quality of available survey data (i.e. inadequate sample size or lack of comprehensive...