Strategic Roll Call Vote Requests

Roll call vote analyses used to infer ideal-points of legislators or the cohesiveness of parties all implicitly assume that the data-generating process leading to such votes is random and does not affect MPs' behavior. If roll call votes, however, are requested by party leaders or MPs, this assumption is unlikely to hold. Strategic considerations by the actors requesting roll calls are likely to influence the inferences we wish to make based on observed voting behaviors by legislators. To address this issue, we propose a strategic estimator for roll call vote requests and apply it to data on roll call vote requests from several parliaments. We find that strategic considerations play a considerable role in roll call vote requests.