The Perils of Using Roll-Call Vote Data

Roll Call Votes (RCVs) are widely used in the study of legislative behavior around the world. Previous work has demonstrated that RCVs can be a sample of votes cast, and a biased one at that. Despite evidence for concern, little has been to document the extent of the potential problem and study when and why RCVs are used. In this project, we first demonstrate how globally widespread this potential problem is, and present our efforts to date to collect the information necessary to start to systematically study the use of RCVs.