The Calculus of Cosponsorship in the U.S. Senate

We investigated why a legislator would be willing to vote “yea” on final passage of a bill but would choose not to cosponsor that bill. We tested a series of hypotheses regarding the cosponsorship decisions of individual senators, using a dataset that includes every major initiative that was introduced and received a floor vote in the Senate between 1975 and 2000. We found that senators are more likely to cosponsor bills when their preferences diverge from the Senate median but are closer to those of the bill's sponsor. Also, senators are more likely to cosponsor bills when they sponsor a higher number of bills overall, when they become more connected with colleagues, and when their constituents increase demand for legislation within particular policy areas. Senators are less likely to cosponsor bills if they received a higher percentage of the general election vote in their most recent election.     

Democratisation, External Exposure and State Food Distribution in The Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with a 'failed' state, requires regular financial assistance from international funds and remains exposed to external economic pressures. State food distribution in the country, however, adheres to traditional statist policies and institutions that disappeared elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1980s and 1990s. Relevant literature arguably does not anticipate this outcome. This article proposes that political institutions associated with Dominican democratisation since the late 1970s, particularly strong presidentialism, a stable, non-ideological party system and high voter turnout at elections, provide incentives for a status quo, clientelistic policy in this strategic area of social policy.     

Scaling Policy Preferences from Coded Political Texts

Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left‐right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds‐ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts.