Voting Present: Obama and the Illinois Senate 1999-2004

SAGE Open

James Lo¹ 

关键词: abstention;    roll call voting;    ideal point;    Obama;   

DOI  :  10.1177/2158244013515684

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Sage Journals

【 摘 要 】

During his time as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted “Present” 129 times, a deliberate act of nonvoting that subsequently became an important campaign issue during the 2008 presidential elections. In this article, I examine the use of Present votes in the Illinois state senate. I find evidence that Present votes can largely be characterized as protest votes used as a legislative tool by the minority party. Incorporating information from Present votes into a Bayesian polytomous item-response model, I find that this information increases the efficiency of ideal point estimates by approximately 35%. There is little evidence of significant moderation by Obama when Present votes are accounted for, though my results suggest that Obama’s voting record may have moderated significantly before his subsequent election to the U.S. Senate. My results also suggest that because legislative nonvoting may occur for a variety of reasons, naive inclusion of nonvoting behavior into vote choice models may lead to biased results.

【 授权许可】

CC BY