Estimating Legislators' Preferred Points

Abstract

This paper shows that agnostic spatial models that simultaneously attempt to estimate legislators' preferred points and ideological locations for the proposals on which they vote, such as the well-known NOMINATE model of Poole and Rosenthal, are not identified. The problem arises because the agnostic estimators inherit the granularity of the voting data and, so, cannot recapture the underlying continuous parameter space. I propose an alternative estimator that achieves identification by modeling the agenda.