The elimination of Black voting in the U.S. South after Reconstruction represents the most significant democratic backsliding in American history. Newly collected state legislative roll call records—more than 19,400 unique roll calls from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—are used to examine how Black disfranchisement changed legislative representation.
Ennahda, Tunisia's Islamist movement, has undergone a significant ideological shift toward Muslim Democracy. This article explores the drivers behind this change, hypothesizing that migration to secular democracies plays a crucial role.
Recent advances in studying voting behavior and legislatures rely on ideal point estimation, but modern applications increasingly involve very large data matrices that strain commonly used methods.
A multinomial framework for ideal point estimation (mIRT) is developed using recent advances in Bayesian statistics. The core is a flexible multinomial specification that nests most common ideal-point models as "special cases," providing a single, unified representation for a wide class of models.
This study investigates candidate entry during political polarization. Laboratory experiments reveal citizens with extreme ideal points enter races more frequently than moderates, despite overall low voter representation rates.
Social media use has surged among citizens and politicians in Brazil, and platforms like Twitter became central arenas for debate and propaganda during the highly polarized 2014 legislative and presidential elections. This study asks whether the decision to 'follow' a profile on Twitter can be used to estimate politicians' ideological positions and whether that approach can expose variation within a fragmented legislative body such as the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.
Formal quantitative analyses of legislative activity are increasingly popular in Latin America. However, the estimates these methods produce—especially roll-call based ideal points—have important limits. Recognizing those limits and the methodological adaptations required is crucial before making formal comparisons across institutions.
Existing methods for creating comparable ideal-point estimates across time and chambers impose restrictive assumptions: some legislators are fixed in place or their movement is artificially constrained. Those constraints conflict with theories that expect congressional responsiveness to election dynamics and changes in constituency.
Most ideal-point estimation assumes legislators vote according to spatial (policy) preferences. That assumption ignores non-policy, tactical motives and can produce implausible results in many legislatures—especially in parliamentary systems where party strategy and motion origin matter.