B-Call: Integrating Ideological Position and Political Cohesion in Legislative Voting Models

2025-01-19

AI Summary

Existing research struggles to jointly model legislator ideology and party cohesion in permissive legislative environments with weak party discipline, resulting in limited explanatory power for non-disciplined voting behavior. This paper introduces the B-Call model, the first framework to jointly represent legislator ideology and party voting cohesion as a bivariate random variable within a Bayesian random utility framework extended from multilevel item response theory (IRT). Leveraging roll-call voting data, B-Call simultaneously infers both dimensions. It overcomes the limitations of conventional unidimensional scaling methods and is applicable across diverse institutional contexts—including the United States, Brazil, and Chile—enabling cross-national comparability. Empirical results demonstrate that B-Call substantially improves explanatory power for voting variation under weak party discipline and delivers robust, interpretable, two-dimensional characterizations of legislative behavior.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting
• Humans and AI: Voting
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

This paper combines two significant areas of political science research: measuring individual ideological position and cohesion. Although both approaches help analyze legislative behaviors, no unified model currently integrates these dimensions. To fill this gap, the paper proposes a methodology called B-Call that combines ideological positioning with voting cohesion, treating votes as random variables. The model is empirically validated using roll-call data from the United States, Brazil, and Chile legislatures, which represent diverse legislative dynamics. The analysis aims to capture the complexities of voting and legislative behaviors, resulting in a two-dimensional indicator. This study addresses gaps in current legislative voting models, particularly in contexts with limited party control.

Problem

• Legislative Behavior
• Political Ideology
• Group Voting Cohesion

Innovation

• B-Call Model
• Political Opinions Integration
• Bipartisan Voting Analysis