Perspectives on Legislative Voting

Abstract

Legislative votes – individual MPs voting behavior – have become a central source of information for different strands of political science. They provide the result of a deliberate choice and reflect the interplay of sincere preferences and institutional constraints. This makes them useful to analyze party unity and cohesion, to assess legislator’s ideal points and the dimensionality or level of conflict in parliaments. Furthermore, studying the strategic use of voting procedures, e. g. the request of recorded votes, provides fruitful insights into the strategic behavior of parliamentary actors. RCV may be called for a variety of reasons including position-taking of collective and individual actors. This panel invites papers that analyze legislative votes along these dimensions. The papers shall cover a variety of cases including supra-national (e.g. UNGA or the EP), national and sub-national chambers. Furthermore, various approaches are welcome – being it papers on methodological developments or the application of known procedures to new cases. Thereby the panel intends to enable a fruitful discussion about promises and pitfalls of analyzing legislative votes in various contexts.