Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-NOMINATE Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap

25 Pages Posted: 14 Oct 2008

See all articles by Royce Carroll

Royce Carroll

University of Essex - Department of Government

Jeffrey B. Lewis

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

James Lo

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Department of Political Science

Keith T. Poole

University of Georgia - School of Public and International Affairs

Howard Rosenthal

New York University (NYU) - Wilf Family Department of Politics

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Date Written: September 4, 2008

Abstract

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 parametric bootstrap to DW-NOMINATE and obtain standard errors for the legislator ideal points. These standard errors are in the range of one to four percent of the range of DW-NOMINATE coordinates.

Keywords: Congress, nominate, ideal points

Suggested Citation

Carroll, Royce and Lewis, Jeffrey B. and Lo, James and Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Measuring Bias and Uncertainty in DW-NOMINATE Ideal Point Estimates via the Parametric Bootstrap (September 4, 2008). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1281667 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1281667

Royce Carroll

University of Essex - Department of Government ( email )

Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ, CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom

Jeffrey B. Lewis

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) ( email )

405 Hilgard Avenue
Box 951361
Los Angeles, CA 90095
United States

James Lo

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Department of Political Science ( email )

Loas Angeles, CA
United States

Keith T. Poole (Contact Author)

University of Georgia - School of Public and International Affairs ( email )

Baldwin Hall
Athens, GA 30602-6254
United States

Howard Rosenthal

New York University (NYU) - Wilf Family Department of Politics ( email )

715 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
United States

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