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Estimating Parties’ Policy Positions in Uruguay: Comparing Scaling Methods Based on Legislative Speeches and Roll-Call Votes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2023

Diego Luján Open the ORCID record for Diego Luján [Opens in a new window] ,
Nicolás Schmidt  and
Juan A. Moraes
Diego Luján
Affiliation:
Diego Luján is a professor. diego.lujan@cienciassociales.edu.uy.
Nicolás Schmidt
Affiliation:
Nicolás Schmidt is a assistant professor. nschmidt@cienciassociales.edu.uy.
Juan A. Moraes
Affiliation:
Juan A. Moraes is a professor. jmoraes@cienciassociales.edu.uy.
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Abstract

This research note takes advantage of a novel dataset to analyze legislators’ behavior in Uruguay’s Parliament. Comparing the positions of legislators based on floor speeches and roll-call voting, it discusses the relationship between discourse and voting among individual legislators and parties. The dataset contains more than 57,000 speeches from more than 1,000 Uruguayan legislators between 1985 and 2015 and its related R package. The study estimates the parties’ policy positions on the basis of two data sources, roll-call votes and floor speeches, and then compares both results. Contrary to expectations, no clear association appears between the two scaling methods, demonstrating that vote and legislative speech may reflect the behavior of individual legislators with potentially conflicting goals. Strategic calculations or party discipline may be plausible explanations for the divergent results obtained from text and roll-call scaling methods.

Keywords

Political partiespolicy positionsscaling methodsroll-call voteslegislative speechesUruguay
Type
Research Notes
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , November 2023 , pp. 130 - 146
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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Footnotes

All in the Departamento de Ciencia Política, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay.

Competing interests: The authors declare none.

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