Notes on W-NOMINATE

October 14, 2017

This notes are based on Poole and Rosenthal (1997) Static NOMINAl Three-
step Estimation(W-NOMINATE):
Drop legislators with less than 10 votes and roll calls with less than 2.5% of
votes in the minority to avoid perfect agreement.
1. For roll call j = 1, ..., q and dimension k = 1, ..., s, set the cutting line
zmjk that best classify each roll call by identifying its midpoint m, and
the distance to the cutting line djk = zmjk zjyk and djk = zjnk zmjk
where zjy/n is the number of yea and nay respectively.
2. For each legislator i = 1, ..., p estimate his/her ideal point xik :
Given two legislators, i and h, construct agreement score
# of roll calls where i and h vote the same
Aih = 100
# of roll calls where i and h both vote

100Aih
Re-scale to a zero to two scale by dih = 50
Double center the matrix of mean distances
1
Y = [D rJ 0 Jc0 + JJ 0 m] = XX 0 + E
2
where r and c are row and column mean vectors, m is the matrix mean
and J is a vector of ones. Replace missing values by m and obtain

Y = XX 0 + E

Estimate
Pp coordinates
Pp by minimizing standard Ps squared error loss function
= i=1 h=1 [dih dih ]2 where dih = [ k=1 (xik xgk )2 ]1/2
Assume legislator coordinates are

xit = xi0 + xi1 t1 + xi2 t2 + xi3 t3 + ... + xiv tv

where t are Legendre polynomials and t = 1, ..., T is the time of each

legislator in the congress.

1
 3. Assume Ps 2 2
uijy = e[ k=1 wk dijy /2]
(1)
Ps
with d2ijy = k=1 (xik zjyk )2 Euclidean distance between legislator is
ideal point vector xi and zjy vector of policy outcomes associated with Yea.
Estimate maximizing log likelihood for the first dimension, with weights
set equal to 1, and re-scale ideal points to [-1,1]. Estimate weights only
for higher dimensions.

Repeat steps for higher dimensions.

Scores are not comparable between congresses, however, distances from leg-
islators ideal point to the median ideal point of the party are.
W-NOMINATE is sensible to the far right deputy in every dimension. After
checking with different deputies and getting the same relative results, I was
inclined to set as reference a deputy that is in all but one congress, and rotate the
plot to get the proper meaning. For the remaining congress, I choose as reference
a legislator with the closest ideal point to the previous reference legislator.