Comparing Cosponsorship and Roll‐Call Ideal Points
Abstract
We use bill cosponsorship and roll‐call vote data to compare legislators' revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal‐component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House (1973–2000) and Argentine Chamber (1983–2002). The ideal‐point estimates of legislators' revealed preferences based on cosponsorship data strongly correlate with similar estimates derived from roll‐call vote data. Also, cosponsorship activity in the U.S. House has lower dimensionality than cosponsorship has in the Argentine Chamber. We explain this lower discrimination as a function of individual‐ and district‐level factors in both countries.
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Co-sponsorship data can produce estimates of ideal points that are highly correlated with those derived from roll-call votes.
“Despite these differences, previous work [3] showed that co-sponsorship data can produce estimates of ideal points that are highly correlated with those derived from roll-call votes.”
From DSP: A Statistically-Principled Structural Polarization Measure (2026) · cites this paper as [3]
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DSP: A Statistically-Principled Structural Polarization Measure
Preti, G., Riondato, M., Gionis, A., & De Francisci Morales, G. (2026) · Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining · doi:10.1145/3773966.3777942
- Authors
- ALEMÁN, E., CALVO, E., JONES, M. P., & KAPLAN, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Houston (US)
- Corresponding author
- ALEMÁN, EDUARDO
- CALVO, ERNESTO
- JONES, MARK P.
- KAPLAN, NOAH
- Venue
- Legislative Studies Quarterly
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2009-02
- Volume
- 34
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 87-116
- ISSN
- 0362-9805 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-9162
- OpenAlex
- W2162045099
- Cited by
- 125
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 13 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 41.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Legislative Studies Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Game Theory and Voting Systems
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Science Research and Education
- Keywords
- roll-call voting, ideal points, revealed preference, legislators, United States House of Representatives, Argentine Chamber of Deputies, principal component analysis, dimensionality, comparative legislatures
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