Pinpointing The Powerful: Covoting Network Centrality As A Measure of Political Influence

NILS RINGE
STEVEN L. WILSON
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Pinpointing the Powerful:

Covoting Network Centrality as a
Measure of Political Influence
This article introduces centrality in covoting networks as a measure of influence.
Based on a simple cueing dynamic, it conceptualizes those lawmakers as most central—
and thus as having the greatest signaling influence—who impact the greatest number of
colleagues’ voting decisions. A formal proof and an agent-based simulation show that
cue-providers are always more central than followers; hence, we can use real-world
voting data to identify the most influential legislators. To confirm the measure’s con-
struct validity, we predict covoting centrality in the European Parliament and find those
factors that are expected to impact legislators’ influence to predict their centrality.
Political actors are not created equal. Some are more influential
than others, be it due to the formal positions of power they hold, positive
personal traits like skills, experience, expertise, ambition, and determina-
tion, or less positive traits, like a lack of scruples. Yet, measuring political
power and influence is exceedingly difficult. In this article, we introduce
a new measure of influence that draws from the study of power in social
networks: political actors’ centrality in covoting networks. Specifically,
we use legislators’ voting patterns to measure their social connectedness
and, on this basis, examine the structural positions of individual law-
makers to determine their relative influence (Bailey and Sinclair 2008).
The basis for this conceptualization of voting as a relational activity is a
simple cueing dynamic in which some lawmakers (cue-receivers) follow
the lead of select colleagues (cue-providers) when voting in a legislature.
Those legislators whose cues influence the greatest number of colleagues’
voting decisions are most central in the legislative covoting network and
thus have the greatest signaling influence.1
We maintain that cue-providers should always be more central
than their followers in covoting networks, which allows us to identify
those legislators who are most influential in the sense that their signals
affect the votes of the greatest number of colleagues. We make this case,
LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 2, May 2016 1

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12129
C 2016 Washington University in St. Louis
V
2 Nils Ringe and Steven L. Wilson
first, by presenting a formal proof to show that cue-providers are always

more central than cue-followers. Second, we construct an agent-based
model that simulates legislatures of various sizes and parameterizations
to demonstrate the proof’s robustness to a variety of real-world scenar-
ios. In the empirical section, we calculate the covoting centrality scores
of members of the European Parliament (EP) and identify the factors
that determine them. Our analysis suggests the construct validity of our
measure (i.e., covoting centrality measures what we purport it measures)
in that factors that can be expected to impact individual legislators’
signaling influence are indeed predictive of the centrality scores of mem-
bers of the EP (MEPs).
The main innovation of this article lies in the use of social network
analysis to gain insights into legislators’ voting behavior. Social network
analysis focuses on the examination of social relationships (or ties)
between individuals (or nodes) and how these connections affect social
and political interactions, processes, and outcomes. The basic unit of
analysis is thus pairs (or dyads) of individual actors. Social network anal-
ysis also allows for the mapping of entire network structures, which are
composed, in the case at hand, of all dyadic covoting ties between a pop-
ulation of lawmakers. Legislative voting is more often than not
conceived of as an individual-level activity, and key to many analyses of
voting behavior is the assumption that voting decisions are independent
of each other.2 However, in this article we think of voting, and voting
data, in broader terms, by considering how we can garner information
about individual-level influence by investigating the covoting network
structure as a whole. Treating covoting data as a relational measure
(where the nodes are individual legislators and the ties the extent to
which dyads of lawmakers both vote yea, both vote nay, or both abstain)
and using them to identify influential legislators constitutes a novel
approach to the study of legislative influence.
Importantly, the approach travels easily to other legislative arenas,
because roll-call votes are often readily available and because our model
is both parsimonious and general—most importantly, it does not make
any restrictive assumptions a priori about why legislators follow cues or
who serves as cue-provider or cue-receiver.3 It is also less costly than
engaging in survey-based research because all that is needed to deter-
mine lawmakers’ signaling influence is a sufficient number of roll-call
votes. Our measure does not make assumptions about legislative influ-
ence by considering the formal positions of power legislators hold (such
as party or committee leader), their seniority, or their fund-raising prow-
ess; instead, it lets the data tell us who wields power by influencing the
votes of the greatest number of fellow legislators.
Pinpointing the Powerful 3
Moreover, while we develop our concept, theory, and measure-

ment in the context of legislative politics, the utility and applicability of
our ideas goes beyond the legislative arena, in that covoting centrality
can be used as a measure of signaling influence in any setting where a
sufficient number of votes is recorded for an identifiable number of
actors, such as records of states signing on to international treaties, or
voting in arenas such as the UN General Assembly, corporate sharehold-
ers meetings, city council meetings, or even department meetings.
The article proceeds by first discussing different ways of meas-
uring legislative influence, including the social network approach
proposed. We then present the mathematical proof and the agent-based
simulation model. Next, we analyze voting data from the EP to test the
applicability of our measure in the “real world”; our empirical results
make substantive sense, thus suggesting its construct validity and
practical utility. The final section concludes.
Measuring Legislative Influence
In the context of American legislative politics, individual legisla-

tors’ influence is usually conceptualized in terms of legislative
“effectiveness” or “productivity.” A common measure is the “hit rate”
of legislators, that is, the percentage of bills that members sponsor that
pass in committee, on the floor, or make it into law (e.g., Arnold 1979;
Bratton and Haynie 1999; Cox and Terry 2008; Frantzich 1979; Garand
and Burke 2006; Howell et al. 2000; Matthews 1960; Sinclair 1986;
Wawro 2000). The most sophisticated version of this approach is Volden
and Wiseman’s (2014) “legislative effectiveness score,” based on mem-
bers of Congress’ “proven ability” to advance their own agenda items
through the legislative process and into law. An alternative proxy for leg-
islative influence has been derived from cosponsorship data, most
importantly Fowler’s (2006a, 2006b) measure of “connectedness.”
While these measures are useful and accessible indicators of legislative
effectiveness, they are problematic for students of comparative legisla-
tive politics because they do not travel easily to many lawmaking
bodies, where (co)sponsorship of legislation is not the norm.
An alternative approach to measuring legislative effectiveness is to
rely on survey data. The problem with this approach, aside from com-
mon concerns about validity and reliability (see Hall 1992), is that
survey data are often not readily available and generally costly to
acquire. It is thus not surprising that there are only a few examples of
such research and that findings are not easily generalized beyond the sin-
gle US legislature or the small number of bills they focus on
(De Gregorio 1997; Hall 1992; Meyer 1980; Miquel and Snyder 2006;
Weissert 1991a, 1991b).
We propose and use an alternative conceptualization of legislative
influence, namely, individual lawmakers’ signaling influence, measured
as their centrality in legislative covoting networks (see also Bailey and
Sinclair 2008). The most influential legislator, in our framework, is the
one who impacts the voting decisions of the greatest number of other
lawmakers by sending positive or negative cues. This arguably consti-
tutes the most consequential form of influence in the legislative process.
The intuition of this approach is grounded in the study of social
networks, which emphasizes that power and influence are inherently
relational. In other words, influence is not derived solely from the prop-
erties of individual actors but also from actors’ structural positions in the
social networks in which they are embedded. Investigating network
structures thus allows us to identify actors who are particularly influen-
tial, or at least have the potential to be. Our approach is to think of
legislators’ voting as a form of social connectedness—we treat votes as
relational. Specifically, we conceive of vote choice as a cueing dynamic,
where one (set of) legislator(s) sends a signal to (an)other (set of) legisla-
tor(s) indicating the appropriate vote choice. This signal can be “any
communication—verbal or non-verbal—intended or unintended—that
is employed by the cue-taker as a prescription for his vote” (Matthews
and Stimson 1975, 51; see also Box-Steffensmeier, Ryan, and Sokhey
2015; Kingdon 1973, 1977; Masket 2008; Ringe 2010; Stimson 1975;
Sullivan et al. 1993).
There are a variety of reasons why an individual legislator may fol-
low a colleague’s cue when casting a vote. One is that the cue-provider
has the capacity to coerce the receiver into adopting her position, be it
through positive incentives (where loyalty is rewarded) or negative
inducements (where dissidents are punished). In this scenario, which
captures the idea of “party discipline,” cue-receivers (e.g., the party
rank-and-file) may follow the cue-provider’s (e.g., the party leadership)
vote choice even if it contradicts their own policy preferences. The deci-
sion of the cue-receiver to adopt the position of cue-provider may not be
involuntary, however. Instead, there are a number of reasons why the
cue-receiver might willingly follow a cue. The first is that the cue-
receiver either knows or assumes that the provider’s preferences match
her own. She adopts the cue because it reflects how she would vote even
in the absence of the cue, yet she does not have to independently deter-
mine her policy position. Second, cue-receivers may not be able to
properly evaluate the link between the content of legislation and its con-
sequences upon implementation. There are numerous possible reasons
for this incapacity, such as the reality that legislators routinely make
decisions on policies that fall outside their area of expertise; a lack of
staff, time, and other resources necessary to gather relevant information;
or a lack of personal attributes like experience, education, intellect, skill,
or ambition. Such legislators rely on cues from colleagues who they con-
sider to be better equipped to make an informed choice, which implies a
cueing dynamic where certain subsets of lawmakers have access to infor-
mation that cue-receivers do not, or a division of labor between cue-
providers and cue-receivers across issue areas. A third cueing dynamic
also suggests a division of labor between legislators, yet one that is not
based on the assumption that the cue-provider is better able to make the
“right” choice. Rather, it describes a tit-for-tat situation, where the
receiver follows the provider’s cue based on the understanding that next
time around their roles will be reversed. Fourth, cue-receivers might
adopt a cue because normative considerations compel them to follow.
For example, they may have a sense of loyalty toward the cue-provider,
making their adherence to the cue the appropriate action. The fifth and
final reason for voluntary cueadoption implies less of an “automatic”
dynamic, where the receiver adopts the cue more or less unchallenged.
Instead, the cue provider convinces the receiver not to disregard the cue;
cueing is based on persuasion.4
It is important to note, however, that cues can be both positive (as
those described in the above paragraphs, where cue-receivers choose to
adopt the cue-provider’s position) or negative (prompting them to cast
an opposite vote). In an instance of negative cueing, for example, con-
gressional Democrats in the 104th US Congress would consider a cue
provided by Newt Gingrich to be a strong indication for how not to vote.
Ringe, Victor, and Gross (2013) argue and demonstrate empirically that
negative voting cues from political opponents are a valuable tool for law-
makers as they consider their voting options, and the idea of negative
signals is quite prevalent in formal theory (Gehlbach 2012; McCarty and
Meirowitz 2007).
Our conceptualization of signaling influence seeks to capture all
these possibilities. Indeed, one of the strengths of our simple cueing
model is that it is sufficiently parsimonious and general to capture the
wide variety of motivations for lawmakers to follow a cue or not; it does
not make any restrictive assumptions about legislators’ motivations. All
we assume, a priori, is that there is a temporal voting sequence in which
the cue-provider offers a cue at time t and the receiver casts a vote, with
some probability of either following the cue or not, at time t11. Accord-
ingly, the particular substantive contexts that determine why individual
legislators adopt or reject cues, and who serves as cue-provider
(e.g., party leaders, senior members, or expert legislators), are not rele-
vant to our model. While it is certainly true that political institutions,
institutional dynamics, and the subtleties of decision making matter in
determining who is and is not influential in a particular legislative set-
ting, we do not integrate such considerations into our model because
they would (unnecessarily) undermine its parsimony and generality. In
other words, we purposely and consciously keep our approach simple,
which allows it to travel to a variety of legislative arenas, to be used
for cross-country comparative work, and even to be applied to other
empirical settings in which votes are recorded.
We also do not seek to directly capture the impact of external cues,
that is, signals legislators may receive from actors outside of the legisla-
ture itself, such as members of the executive, leaders of party
organizations (as opposed to legislative factions), or interest groups and
lobbyists. While such influences undoubtedly matter, covoting centrality
can only be calculated when voting data are available, which it is not for
external cue-providers. Indirectly, however, our model does allow for
the possibility of external cueing at two stages of the cueing process.
First, the initial cue offered by a cue-provider is exogenous to our model,
and we make no assumptions about how she might have arrived at her
position. Hence, we are agnostic as to whether she had an independent
original position on an issue, carefully researched the content and
expected consequences of a bill, or received an external cue. Second, we
assume that cue-receivers adopt internal cues with some probability,
which again may be a function of external influences, at least in part. For
example, cues received from interest groups might decrease the probabil-
ity that an internal cue is followed. In sum, the possibility of external
cueing might affect the initial vote choice of internal cue-providers and
decrease how much of the variance in legislators’ vote choice can be
explained by internal cueing. It does not, however, affect what we seek
to measure in this article: the relative signaling influence of legislators
themselves.5
Our principal expectation is that cue-providers are more central in
the legislative covoting network. Indeed, the more cue-receivers are
influenced by the cue-provider, the greater the latter’s centrality in the
covoting network. In this sense, centrality implies influence. A major
challenge to this proposition, however, lies in the reality that the data
that serve as the basis for our centrality measures, covoting, are undir-
ected (or symmetric): If Legislator A casts at least one like-vote as
Legislator B, then the two are connected, and we can make no assump-
tions about the direction of their connection. In other words, if we
observe that Legislators A and B vote alike, we do not know if this is
because A follows B’s lead, or vice versa. This symmetry is problematic

in that it does not match the theoretical proposition of a cueing dynamic,
where the cue-receiver’s vote choice is dependent on the cue-provider’s
signal. Our theory of legislative influence thus implies a directionality that
is, as such, unobservable in the data we use to measure it. This is only a
problem if we examine covoting only at the dyadic level, however;
observing broader network patterns gives us additional analytic leverage.
Simply put, we may not be able to differentiate between cue-provider and
cue-receiver when we only look at two legislators, but we are able to do so
when we consider the voting patterns of larger groups because an individ-
ual legislator will be more central if a group of colleagues systematically
adopts or opposes his or her positions across a number of votes.
We formalize this logic in two independent ways. First, we demon-
strate mathematically that the centrality of a cue-provider should always
be higher than those of cue-receivers. Second, we use an agent-based
model that simulates voting behavior on the basis of the cueing dynamic
outlined above, allowing us to model more complex scenarios, where
cue-receivers adopt the positions of groups of colleagues (as opposed to
individual cue-providers) or that of the “majoritarian” legislator who
always votes with the majority of the legislature. While the formal proof
demonstrates the sufficiency of cue provision to centrality (cue-providers
are systematically more central), the agent-based model tests the robust-
ness of that centrality in the face of real-world noise, in addition to
demonstrating the necessity of cue provision (exogenous factors cannot
result in non-cue-providers with higher centrality than cue-providers).
Defining Centrality
There are many types of centrality that can be calculated from a

given network. These measures do not necessarily correlate with each
other even on identical networks, since different types of centrality are
designed to measure different elements of the network. The three most
commonly used types of centrality are betweenness, closeness, and
degree centrality. Betweenness centrality captures the extent to which
nodes connect isolated parts of the network, while closeness centrality
measures how many “steps” it takes for a node to reach all others. Nei-
ther of these is appropriate as a measure of cueing, however, because
betweenness centrality would be maximized in those who pass along the
cues rather than the cue-provider, and closeness centrality would be
driven by the average distance between different cue-receivers. This dis-
tance is irrelevant in the cueing context, where the intersection of
sending and receiving is of interest. Degree centrality is in many ways
the simplest approach to capture centrality, as a measure of each node’s

number of ties. These may be weighted by tie strength, and we maintain
that weighted degree centrality is the most appropriate measure when
examining legislative covoting networks, since every node may touch
all others, but with varying degrees of intensity. This captures the
basic intuition that signaling influence reflects the capacity to affect the
greatest number of colleagues’ voting decisions. Formally, the weighted
degree centrality Ci of actor i is
Xn
Ci 5 wij ;
j51
where wij is the weight of the relationship between i and j. In a theoretical

sense, wij is a measure of how influential i is on j’s decision making, that is,
how likely j is to look to cues being sent by i. There are several ways of
operationalizing this into a measure rather than something akin to a latent
variable. The use of covoting rates between i and j is one option, but it is
problematic because it does not account for the possibility of negative
signaling.
We use the absolute value of the Pearson correlation coefficient
between the voting records of each dyad of legislators as the weight in
our centrality calculation, such that wij5jqijj, where qij is the Pearson
correlation coefficient between the voting records of legislators i and j.
The reason for this operationalization is that the most central legislator
should be the one whose cues influence the votes of the greatest number
of cue-receivers, while low centrality scores should be reflective of
irrelevance to the voting decisions of others. In other words, our mea-
sure must allow for the possibility of both positive and negative cueing.
To return to our Newt Gingrich example from above, his signaling
influence/covoting centrality should reflect both the tendency of Repub-
licans to support and the tendency of Democrats to oppose him because
positive correlations with the former are as much evidence of his signal-
ing influence as negative correlations with the latter. Yet, if we used raw
correlations instead of the absolute value of correlation, the centralities
of influential yet highly divisive cue-providers like Gingrich would be
minimized because the positive and negative correlations they generate
would cancel each other out. Relying on the absolute value
of correlation avoids this distortion and successfully captures the basic
premise underlying the signaling influence concept.
Finally, to make our foundation more portable, we normalize the
centrality by legislature size n. Thus, we can compare centralities
calculated in legislatures of different sizes. This yields our final equation

for centrality, whose output is bounded between 0 and 1, where 1
represents a legislator whose votes are perfectly correlated with all
others, and 0 represents a legislator voting randomly relative to others:
1X n
Ci 5 jq j:
n j51 ij
It should be noted that any operationalization of centrality based

on the voting records of the legislators can be problematic in that such
records include no direct reflection of the network structure that gener-
ated the votes in the first place. Voting records imply a network
structure, but that structure is flattened from the multiple dimensions of a
network diagram (with its multitude of possible emergent measures such
as distance, adjacency, and indirect ties between nodes) into strictly
dyadic data. Mathematically, the voting records are a lower-dimensional
projection of a multidimensional object and thus represent a loss of data
that cannot be fully recovered. For example, a voting record showing
that A votes the same as B half the time could be generated by a network
in which B follows A half the time, one in which B follows C all the
time while C follows A half the time, or a myriad of other structures.
Weighted degree centrality is the least vulnerable of the centralities to
this flattening, by virtue of being the least driven by network structure,
but it is still a concern. Later in the article, we use an agent-based model
to demonstrate how effectively this operationalization “recovers” the
latent centralities of different networks.
A Formal Proof of Cue-Provider Centrality
We hypothesize that cue-providers should always have higher cen-

trality than cue-receivers. In this section, we demonstrate that a cue-
provider’s centrality will always have a higher expected value than that
of any cue-receivers in a single-party legislature, for any parameteriza-
tion. In formal terms, where CL is the centrality of the cue-provider and
V is the set of all legislators, we argue that:
CL Ci 8i 2 V :
We begin with our definition of centrality. In correlations between

dichotomous variables (such as we have here, with yes or no votes), the
Pearson correlation coefficient reduces mathematically to the Phi
coefficient, sometimes referred to as the mean square contingency coeffi-

cient, or /ij.6 While the change to the equation may seem cosmetic, it
renders the equations much more tractable at a later stage of the proof.
This yields the centrality equation:
1X n
Ci 5 j/ j:
n j51 ij
In the simplest nontrivial legislature of one cue-provider and two

cue-receivers (hereafter followers), in which we designate the cue-
provider “voter #1” and the two followers “voters #2” and “voters #3,”
this suggests the following two conditions must be met to demonstrate
that the cue-provider’s centrality is greater than the followers:
1X n
1X n
j/1j j j/ j
n j51 n j51 2j
1X n
1X n
j/1j j j/ j:
n j51 n j51 3j
Canceling out equal terms and expanding the summations

simplifies these conditions to:
/13 /23
/12 /32 :
Therefore, the centrality of the cue-provider will be greater than or

equal to that of the followers provided that the correlation between the
cue-provider and either follower is greater than or equal to the correlation
between the two followers’ voting records. We now use the definition of
/ij from Pearson to prove that these conditions are met:
n11 n00 2n10 n01
/ij 5 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ;
nt1 nt0 n1t n0t
where n is the total number of votes, n11 and n00 are the number of times
that both voters voted “Yes” and “No,” respectively, and n10 and n01 are
the number of times they voted “Yes” and “No,” or “No” and “Yes,”
respectively. Each of these terms can be further defined in terms of exog-
enous probabilities, where p is the probability that the cue-provider votes
“Yes” on any bill, and q2 and q3 are the probabilities that followers #2
and #3 follow the cue-provider on any given vote.
After substituting these terms into the equations for /12, /13, and
/23 and simplifying, we find that each can be expressed solely in terms
of exogenous probabilities:
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ð2qj 21Þ pð12pÞ
/1j 5 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2ð2pqj 2p2qj Þð2pqj 2p2qj 11Þ
ð2q2 21Þð2q3 21Þpð12pÞ
/23 5 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi :
ð2pq2 2p2q2 Þð2pq2 2p2q2 11Þð2pq3 2p2q3 Þð2pq3 2p2q3 11Þ
Once these two expressions are dropped into the two conditions
that we established earlier, and everything is multiplied out, terms start
canceling out. For parsimony, we do not detail each step of the algebra,7
but the results are simply that for the two conditions to hold, the follow-
ing two conditions must be met: q2<1 and q3<1. Since both q2 and q3
are probabilities, these conditions are true by inspection. Thus, for any
three-voter legislature, the cue-provider’s centrality will be greater than
or equal to that of each follower.
Generalizing the three-voter case to an arbitrarily sized legislature
is easy. We begin by looking at the four-voter case, which yields the
following starting point for demonstrating that the centrality of the
cue-provider is greater than or equal to the centrality of voter #2:
/11 1/12 1/13 1/14 /12 1/22 1/23 1/24 :
Canceling out equal terms yields the following:
/13 1/14 /23 1/24 :
However, note that each of these terms is independent of the num-

ber of voters in the legislature. That is, since /13 is only a function of p
and q3, it has exactly the same value in the four-voter legislature as it did
in the three-voter legislature, and it will have the same value in an
n-voter legislature. The same is true for /23, since it is a function only of
p, q2, and q3, and not any of the parameters associated with the other vot-
ers. The same is true for each term of the equation. And since we have
already demonstrated that /1k is greater than or equal to /2k earlier in
our analysis, then by inspection, the first term on the left side of our last
equation must be greater than or equal to the first term on the right side,
and the second term on the left must be greater than or equal to the
second term on the right. Thus, the sum of the left terms must be greater
than or equal to the sum of the right terms, which proves that the cue-
provider must have the greatest centrality in the case of a four-voter
legislature. The same logic applies to the n-voter legislature, since the
terms on each side can always be paired off in the same way, for an arbi-
trary number of voters. Thus in the single-party case, within the
framework of our assumptions, the cue-provider must always have
greater centrality than any of her followers regardless of the particular
values of exogenous parameters.8
An Agent-Based Model
We also construct an agent-based model in R, which complements

the formal model in four principal ways. First, as it is constructed from a
starting point distinct from that of the proof, the agent-based model inde-
pendently confirms its predictions. Second, the agent-based model can
be parameterized with arbitrary complexity, allowing us to confirm the
robustness of the formal proof’s finding to the noise and intricacy of
real-world data. Third, the model allows us to demonstrate that legisla-
tors voting exogenously (that is, neither providing nor receiving cues),
as well as those who always vote with the majority, do not end up with
higher centrality scores than cue-providers. Finally, it shows that our
centrality measure outperforms alternatives when it comes to recovering
the “true” centralities of covoting networks.
The model is constructed of a single legislature, composed of any
number of voters. Voters come in two types: cue-providers and fol-
lowers. A cue-provider has an exogenously defined probability of voting
yes or no on any given bill. We do not model bills themselves or ascribe
any meaning to them other than as events that require all voters to vote.
The followers each have an exogenously defined probability of voting
the same as the cue-provider. This probability may, for example, reflect
the simple reality that even members of the same party can have diver-
gent interests or that external cues impact voting patterns (as discussed
above). Parties are implicitly constructed by creating groups of voters
with similar following probabilities.
This framework is deceptively simple, yet it allows the modeling
of complex legislatures. While it seems that multiple cue-providers
would be necessary to model a realistic legislature, the opposite is true.
In our model, cue-providers are those who vote completely independ-
ently, and so modeling the leader of each party as cue-provider would
imply that knowing how Party A’s cue-provider voted would tell you
nothing about how Party B’s cue-provider voted. The two should be
TABLE 1
Representative Results of Agent-Based Simulations
n Avg q CL Avg CF Max CF t E(CL) E(CF)
10 .25 .4869 .2633 .3649 2.136 .5 .375

.50 .1129 .1161 .1560 2.0435 0 0
.75 .5071 .2948 .3828 2.212 .5 .375
.90 .8094 .6703 .7555 1.655 .8 .72
25 .25 .5119 .2739 .3905 2.996 .5 .375
.50 .1132 .1138 .1455 2.0220 0 0
.75 .5013 .2648 .3897 2.950 .5 .375
.90 .8020 .6502 .7546 2.105 .8 .72
50 .25 .4951 .2531 .3744 3.628 .5 .375
.50 .1156 .1147 .1437 .0745 0 0
.75 .5046 .2637 .3966 3.385 .5 .375
.90 .8025 .6465 .7679 2.200 .8 .72
200 .25 .5046 .2595 .4080 4.089 .5 .375
.50 .1154 .1139 .1300 .2373 0 0
.75 .5012 .2567 .4184 4.022 .5 .375
.90 .8016 .6434 .7879 2.329 .8 .72
Note: Lightly shaded columns on left are parameters input into simulation, unshaded middle
columns are the results of the simulation, darkly shaded columns on right are the expected
results calculated from the equations derived for the proof.
correlated, and thus one is nested under the other in the hierarchy of
cue provision. In the case of multiple nested cue-providers, any fol-
lower’s probability can still be reduced to a function of the probability of
following the top-most cue-provider.
We provide the model a set of voters with exogenous probabilities
of adopting a cue and the number of rounds of voting (r). For each
round, the cue-provider votes randomly based on her exogenous proba-
bility. Then based on their exogenous probabilities, the followers either
vote with the cue-provider or not. This results in an n 3 r voting matrix
of yes/no votes, which is transformed into an n 3 n correlation matrix
that we use to calculate the centrality of each voter (an n 3 1 vector).
Table 1 shows representative results, aggregated from 50 simulations of
each reported permutation. We report average values of cue-provider
centrality, mean follower centrality, and maximum follower centrality.
The table also contains a t-score indicating how statistically different the
cue-provider was from the average follower, in addition to the expected
values of cue-provider and follower centrality calculated from the equa-
tions presented with our proof. Test runs with a variety of other
parameterizations produced no significant deviations.
As a baseline, we consider a scenario that only involves the cue-

provider and legislators who have a 50% chance of following. We call
the latter “independents” since they do not systematically follow the
cue-provider. Note that this setup effectively negates the basic premise
of this article, that legislative voting is a relational activity, since the
votes of all legislators involved are independent of one another. Our
baseline scenario is, therefore, theoretically illogical because when no
one legislator’s vote is in any way related to another’s, the results that
measuring covoting centrality produces do not actually reflect a process
where legislators influence each other’s votes. Hence, it is not surprising
that the baseline model has an outcome where cue-providers and cue-
receivers are indistinguishable from each other—the centralities of cue-
providers and followers are not significantly different from each other.
Nevertheless, it is a useful theoretical starting point because it delineates
a key scope condition of our model: In order for our propositions to
hold, voting must be conceived of as a relational process where at least
some cueing takes place between legislators. It follows that, in order to
model an actual cueing process, probabilities of following must move
away from 50% (whether up or down). And, indeed, once we allow for
this, the cue-provider’s centrality both increases and becomes signifi-
cantly different from the followers in all settings. At the extremes, the
difference between voting records is smaller, and therefore it is harder to
distinguish the cue-provider. Even so, at levels of follower probability
exceeding 90%, not a single follower exceeds the cue-provider’s
centrality in hundreds of simulations.9
These results make intuitive sense because the cue-provider is the
only agent in the model who acts independently of other actors. By defi-
nition, the cue-provider’s voting record contains more information than
the followers’, since their voting is a function of the cue-provider’s.
Hence, even at the extreme cases in which followers are voting with (or
against) the cue-provider a vanishingly small percentage of the time, just
that tiny proportion is enough to make the cue-provider marginally more
central than the followers. Another way to think of it is that for a follower
to have a higher centrality than the cue-provider, other voters’ records
would need to be more correlated with hers than with the cue-provider’s.
But since the followers are defined relative to the cue-provider rather
than other followers, any follower is always a step further from any other
follower than from the cue-provider.
To demonstrate the robustness of our approach and to show that
non-cue-providers do not end up with higher centrality than cue-
providers, we also modeled an additional type of voter, whom we label
the “majoritarian” because she always votes with the majority in every
round. Repeated simulations demonstrate that, despite this

“opportunism,” majoritarians always end up with lower centrality than
cue-providers. This is a crucial finding because it is with majoritarians
that we would be most concerned about false positives (i.e., identifying
non-cue-providers as more central than cue-providers), since they always
side with the winners. This, in turn, demonstrates that cue provision is a
necessary condition for centrality because the majoritarian also captures
the most extreme instance of factors that are exogenous to the cueing pro-
cess driving voting behavior such that they maximize a given voter’s
centrality, namely, when she casts votes independently of her colleagues
but just happens to always vote with the majority.
Our simulations identify only one circumstance where a cue-
provider may end up less central than followers, namely, when the
agent-based model is run on multiple parties within one legislature.
Here, the cue-provider of the largest party generally emerges with the
highest centrality, but cue-providers of smaller parties do not necessarily
end up having higher centrality than the most central followers in the
largest party. Whether this is a problem depends on one’s research ques-
tion. In this article, for example, we are concerned with relative covoting
centrality of all legislators, across parties, and it makes sense that a cue-
provider from a small party would end up with a lower centrality score
than at least some members of larger parties, since his cues influence a
small number of colleagues’ votes. If one were interested in within-party
influence, however, it would be necessary to calculate within-party cov-
oting centrality. Moreover, when predicting covoting centrality, it is
imperative to control for the size of each lawmaker’s party or other sub-
group of members who have a tendency to vote alike, as we do in our
empirical analyses below. In sum, if clean lines can be qualitatively
drawn between parties, the approach can identify the most central
individual in each party; if not, then only the individual with the
highest centrality can be definitively identified as cue-provider.
To return to the example of the majoritarian, the reason why she
always ends up with lower centrality than the cue-provider is that cen-
trality is not enhanced by being on the winning side of votes. Consider a
legislature split evenly between two parties, such that each wins half the
time. By always voting with the winner, the majoritarian reduces her cor-
relation with all voters, and thus her centrality. On the other hand, if one
party wins every vote, then the majoritarian is indistinguishable from a
member of that party. So, at one extreme the majoritarian has the lowest
centrality, while at the other she asymptotically approaches the cue-
provider’s centrality. To verify this intuition, we model a legislature with
a single cue-provider, 100 followers, and a single majoritarian.10 The
followers are broken into allies (following 80% of the time) and oppo-
nents (following 20%). We then simulate each permutation of allies and
opponents (i.e., 1 ally and 99 opponents, 2 and 98, etc.) for 100 rounds
of voting. This reveals how the centrality of each voter type behaves
over a range of legislative settings. The top two graphs of Figure 1 show
the results (unlabeled dots are maximum and average follower
centralities).
The results are intriguing, showing that for high proportions of
either allies or opponents, the majoritarian asymptotically approaches
the cue-provider’s centrality. But from 35 to 65% (the range that most
real legislatures would settle into), the majoritarian’s side switching dras-
tically lowers her centrality. When the legislature is evenly split between
allies and opponents, the majoritarian’s centrality drops nearly to zero.
The second graph shows the performance of a traditional calculation of
centrality, which does not take the absolute value of correlation. Using
that algorithm yields cue-provider centrality that is indistinguishable
from the majoritarian for half the graph and less than the majoritarian in
the other half. This highlights the advantage of the absolute-value
approach because the goal is to be able to use voting data to distinguish
who is a cue-provider, not who just votes with everyone else.11
We also test the robustness of these results in the presence of more
than two parties, and with the addition of arbitrary numbers of legislators
voting exogenously from the cueing process. We create a legislature
with 102 voters: one cue-provider, one majoritarian, and a combination
of allies (80% probability of following), opponents (20%), and inde-
pendents (50%).12 The bottom two graphs of Figure 1 show how the
centralities of different voter types vary with the proportion of independ-
ents, where the remaining seats are divided between allies and
opponents. In this case, the difference between cue-providers, followers,
and majoritarians is even more pronounced, with cue-providers having
higher centralities except for the outlying extremes. Moreover, with the
traditional calculation of centrality, all voters hover near a centrality of
zero for all parameterizations because truly exogenous voters are effec-
tively random noise and cancel out each other’s contributions if the
absolute value is not taken. In addition, with the legislature split evenly
between allies and opponents, those correlations also cancel each other
out.13
In each of these examples, the centrality of majoritarians asymp-
totically approaches that of cue-providers at the extremes, in which a
supermajority dominates the legislature. The expected value of majori-
tarian centrality is always less, and even in the cases of supermajorities,
a large sample size can be sufficient to distinguish the two. To illustrate
FIGURE 1
Centrality as a Function of Proportion of Allies and Proportion
of Exogenous Voters, Using Absolute Value and Standard
Calculations of Centrality
this point, we ran repeated simulations to estimate the number of voting

rounds necessary to establish a statistical difference between types of
voters—an important contribution of the model beyond that of the for-
mal proof. We used three sample parameterizations based on the US
Congress, the EP, and a supermajority. With each parameterization,
t-scores indicating the difference between cue-provider and both the
maximum follower and the majoritarian reach substantial statistical
significance long before 1,000 rounds, which is roughly the size of
the available data on the EP.
Finally, we developed an additional robustness check in order to
address the previously mentioned concerns about how well our measure
“recovers” the centrality of a network structure that is flattened into cov-
oting data. We wrote a set of R functions to generate random legislatures
of cueing networks with different sets of parameterizations. We then
used these networks to generate simulated voting records. This allows us
to calculate betweenness, closeness, and weighted degree centrality from
the networks themselves, in addition to our measure of centrality. By
comparing these we can evaluate the robustness of our approach and the
relative correlation of different measures under different structures. We
report the results of simulations run on three classes of randomly gener-
ated cueing networks, each with 100 legislators for simplicity. Simple
limits each cue-receiver to a single cue-provider, thus creating a simple,
but arbitrarily deep, hierarchical network. Moderate features a single
exogenous voter, while each cue-receiver follows three cue-providers,
with randomly generated positive or negative weights. Complex features
five exogenous voters, with each cue-receiver following up to five cue-
providers, again with weights. We generated 1,000 cueing networks
with each algorithm; calculated various centrality measures for every
legislator in each of those networks; simulated 1,000 legislative votes
within each cueing network in order to generate voting records; and
finally calculated both our measure of centrality based on the absolute
values of correlations, in addition to the centrality calculated by the tradi-
tional approach.
Table 2 shows mean correlation matrices for the true and posterior-
generated centralities in each class of network. Note that the various
“true” correlations differ from each other, as they are measuring different
parts of the network structure. The conventional centrality measure has
almost no correlation with ours and likewise does poorly at recovering
true centralities of any sort. On the other hand, our measure is quite
effective. The simple networks are most accurate, while the moderate
and complex are less so, since they have more network structure that is
lost in the conversion to voting data. As expected, betweenness is not
TABLE 2
Correlation Matrices of Different Centrality Measures over Three
Types of Cueing Networks (Mean across 1,000 Simulations, with
100 Voters, and 1,000 Voting Rounds)
Simple
B C D M T
Betweenness (B) 1 0.51 0.68 0.66 0.15

Closeness (C) 0.51 1 0.55 0.91 20.03
Weighted Degree (D) 0.68 0.55 1 0.69 0.15
Our Measure (M) 0.66 0.91 0.69 1 20.03
Traditional (T) 0.15 20.03 0.15 20.03 1
Moderate
B C D M T
Betweenness (B) 1 0.6 0.58 0.25 20.02

Closeness (C) 0.6 1 0.8 0.63 0
Our Measure (M) 0.25 0.63 0.68 1 0.05
Traditional (T) 20.02 0 0.02 0.05 1
Complex
B C D M T
Betweenness (B) 1 0.55 0.43 0.3 20.04

Closeness (C) 0.55 1 0.85 0.54 0.02
Our Measure (M) 0.3 0.54 0.55 1 20.01
Traditional (T) 20.04 0.02 0.06 20.01 1
correlated highly with our measure, unlike closeness and weighted

degree centrality, even in highly complex cueing networks. We are thus
confident that our measure “recovers” a sufficient richness of the cueing
network to make our operationalization robust and meaningful, especially
since those true voting centralities cannot be calculated directly from vot-
ing records. This is strong evidence not only that our measure is efficient
for its intended use, but also that the traditional approach is not.14
In sum, the simulations provide a great deal of analytical leverage
in that they independently confirm the predictions of the formal proof;
confirm the robustness of the formal proof’s finding to the noise of

the “real world” of legislative politics; establish the necessity of
cue provision for centrality; and demonstrate that our measure better
recovers the “true” centralities of covoting networks than alternative
approaches to measuring centrality.
Applying the Concept: Predicting Covoting Centrality in the EP
The empirical analysis we present in this section has two objec-

tives. First, it serves to illustrate the utility of treating centrality as a
measure of (signaling) influence. Second, and more importantly for our
purposes, it allows us to determine if the analysis of real-world data pro-
duces results that make substantive sense, which would increase our
confidence in the theoretical discussions above and be indicative of the
construct validity of our measure (see also Volden and Wiseman 2014,
chap. 2). Our analysis aims to identify the predictors of lawmakers’ cen-
trality in the covoting network of the EP. We focus on the EP because it
is an example of a legislature where members cannot sponsor their own
bills, which means that we cannot use legislators’ “hit rates” as an indi-
cator of their effectiveness or influence. EP voting records are
accessible, however, which allows for the calculation of lawmakers’
covoting centrality. In this effort, we first use the voting records of
MEPs during the EP’s sixth legislative term to generate a correlation
matrix, representing the correlation of each possible dyad’s voting
records. Excluded are votes where the EP as a whole is 95% or more
cohesive, to ensure variance in covoting rates. We then calculate the
centralities of all MEPs using absolute values of the correlations.
In order to further analyze our data, however, we must also deal
appropriately with null votes, that is, voting rounds in which particular
MEPs did not vote. There are two basic approaches: eliminating the null
votes or compensating for their presence. Eliminating the null votes is
not possible because it would effectively eliminate every single MEP.
Nonrandomly eliminating some MEPs or some voting rounds also
decreases our observations and entails the possibility of biasing the
results. Leaving the null votes in (and calculating correlations only
where pairwise matches exist within each dyad) is the remaining option.
However, doing so adds its own problem in that MEPs with vastly dif-
ferent levels of participation but highly correlated voting records will
end up with similar centralities. To address these concerns, we weight
MEPs’ centralities by the fraction of votes they participated in because
our theory rests upon cueing dynamics that depend on legislators’
participation in floor voting.15
Because our dependent variable, covoting centrality, is a social net-

work measure, we cannot assume our observations to be independent
(see especially Cramner and Desmarais 2011). To address this problem,
we rely on a quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) regression model.16
This procedure first computes a basic OLS regression and then randomly
permutes the elements of the dependent vector and recomputes the
regression; this step is repeated multiple times (10,000 iterations, in our
case). It then recovers the R2 and regression coefficients from these runs
and uses them to assemble empirical sampling distributions to estimate
standard errors.17
Our construct validity test involves deriving expectations about the
determinants of signaling influence in the EP (the concept we proclaim
to measure) and testing them by empirically identifying the predictors of
covoting centrality (our measure). The starting point for the discussion
of these expectations is that there is no single leadership group that fully
controls the activities and vote choices of individual MEPs (Kreppel
2006, 260) and that policymaking in the EP is a rather decentralized pro-
cess that eschews strict hierarchies (Ringe 2010). Accordingly, when
asking who we expect to be central in the EP’s covoting network, we
must not only look beyond formal leadership positions, but we must
question the (intuitively sensible) idea that formal legislative leadership
will necessarily be associated with greater covoting centrality. Indeed,
the leaders of EP party groups (the umbrella organizations for national
parties) and committee chairs lack those critical powers that we would
expect to make them pivotal in guiding their colleagues’ vote choices.
For example, they do not control the legislative agenda, because the EP
does not have the power of legislative initiative,18 and gate-keeping
powers are limited (Kreppel 2006, 251)—neither party nor committee
leaders can obstruct action on or halt proposed legislation. Party group
leaders are also limited in their capacity to coerce members to vote a par-
ticular way; as one party official explains, “we would love to have
something to whip people with, but we don’t” (Ringe 2010, 56). Most
importantly, party group leaders cannot threaten members with spoiling
their electoral ambitions because electoral party lists are created by the
national parties that make up EP party groups. They also do not serve as
the all-powerful “gate-keepers” to positions of legislative power, as
proportionality in national representation constrains their ability to
reward loyalty with career advancement (Kreppel 2002, 190, 202).
For these reasons, we expect participation in substantive delibera-
tions and negotiations of legislative proposals to be among the key
determinants of centrality in the EP’s covoting network, not formal legis-
lative leadership. The majority of substantive changes in the content of
legislation and cross-party compromises are constructed in committee

(Kreppel 2006) following deliberations and negotiations among small
groups of key actors who, therefore, serve as cue-providers for other
members (Ringe 2010). Most important, in this regard, are coordinators
(see Kaeding and Obholzer 2012) and rapporteurs (see Yoshinaka,
McElroy, and Bowler 2010). Coordinators serve as their party groups’
spokespersons and main negotiators in each of the EP’s standing com-
mittees (coded 1 if an MEP served in this position and 0 if not), while
rapporteurs are responsible for drafting the EP’s official reports on spe-
cific policy proposals, for shepherding a piece of legislation through the
lawmaking process, and for serving as the EP’s main negotiator with
other EU institutions (operationalized as the number of reports drafted
by each MEP). We expect that:
H1: Serving as coordinator or rapporteur increases MEPs’
covoting centrality.
The EP’s decentralized decision-making process also entails that

individual MEPs can have a great deal of influence on policy-making
processes and outcomes, even if they do not serve as coordinator or rap-
porteur. Legislators may become cue-providers simply by choosing to
actively participate in the policy-making process (Ringe 2010, 59; also
Marshall 2010, 559). We account for this by counting the number of
reports an MEP has drafted amendments to and the number of
“opinions” issued for secondary committees (which may contain amend-
ments). Because both activities aim at modifying the content of
legislation,19 we hypothesize that:
H2: Amending a greater number of reports and issuing more
opinions increases MEPs’ covoting centrality.
Signaling influence should also be a function of tenure in the EP,
since senior legislators are more likely to possess policy-relevant exper-
tise and experience navigating the intricacies of the legislative process
(see Daniel 2013, 836). Accordingly, we account for MEPs’ seniority
and expect that:
H3: A greater number of terms served is positively associated with
MEPs’ covoting centrality.
Finally, because a greater number of colleagues ought to vote with
ideologically moderate legislators than with more radical lawmakers, we
hypothesize that:
H4: The covoting centrality of those legislators who are close to

the EP’s ideological median is expected to be greater.
An obvious measure to include, in this regard, would be legisla-
tors’ NOMINATE scores. Covoting centrality and NOMINATE are
derived from the same voting data, however, which makes predicting
one using the other problematic—even though the two do not measure
the same underlying theoretical construct. Indeed, their respective con-
ceptualizations further preclude the use of NOMINATE in our models
because research stressing the importance of informational signaling and
social ties is incompatible with NOMINATE; after all, the main premise
of our article—that voting is a relational (cueing) process—violates the
basic assumption of the NOMINATE framework: that legislators are
“autonomous, fully-informed actors who vote for the option ‘closest’ to
their ideal policy” (Sinclair et al. 2011, 1). For these reasons, we use
national-party-level ideology scores on the two primary ideological
dimensions in EU politics (left-right and pro-/anti-EU), which are based
on expert surveys rather than roll-call vote data (D€oring and Manow
2010). For example, all German Liberals receive the same scores, those
of Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP).
We control, first, for various formal offices held by MEPs, which
we do not expect to be systematically associated with covoting centrality
for the reasons discussed previously, by including dichotomous meas-
ures for party leadership (coded 1 if an MEP served as president of his or
her party group; 0 if not), committee leadership (coded 1 if an MEP
served as committee chair; 0 if not), and EP leadership (coded 1 if an
MEP was a member of the EP’s Bureau; 0 if not).20 Also, since the cen-
trality of MEPs is partly a function of the size of the subgroups of
legislators with a tendency to vote alike (see above), we control for the
number of MEPs in each party group. Finally, we control for MEPs’
gender, which may be salient in affecting covoting.21
One potential problem with the use of covoting centrality as the
dependent variable is that the relationships between centrality and our
independent variables may be endogenous. For example, lawmakers with
high levels of centrality may be more likely to be selected for leadership
positions or as parliament’s rapporteur for a piece of legislation. For this
reason, we introduce a temporal dimension into our models, where inde-
pendent variables measured at time t (here: the first half of EP6, July
2004–December 2006) predict covoting centrality at time t11 (the second
half of EP6, January 2007–June 2009, based on a total of 1,040 votes).22
Table 3 presents the results of our analyses. Model 1 includes the
complete list of independent variables, and, as a robustness check,
TABLE 3
Results
Model 1 Model 2
Coefficient p Coefficient p
Coordinator 0.0246 0.041 0.025 0.042

Rapporteur (reports drafted) 0.0027 0.11 0.0025 0.112
Reports amended 0.0015 0.017 0.0017 0.002
Opinions 0.0028 0.268
Tenure 0.0125 0.007 0.0126 0.005
L-R distance to EP median 20.0117 0.038 20.0111 0.045
Pro-/anti-EU distance to EP median 20.0078 0.013 20.0083 0.006
Party leader 0.0051 0.418
Committee leader 20.0154 0.201
EP leader 0.0196 0.255
Party size 0.0005 0.000 0.0005 0.000
Female 0.0095 0.198
Intercept 0.1821 1.00 0.1858 1.00

R2 0.26 0.26
N 817 817
Model 2 drops all insignificant predictors. The results are consistent

across both models.23 We find, first, that those MEPs involved in sub-
stantive deliberations and negotiations concerning specific policy
proposals are systematically more central in the EP’s covoting network:
Serving as a party group’s coordinator in committee or as rapporteur is
positively associated with covoting centrality. Hypothesis 1 is thus con-
firmed—with the important caveat that the results for rapporteurs only
approximate conventional levels of statistical significance (p .1).
Hypothesis 2 finds partial confirmation, in that only the number of
reports a legislator amends is positively associated with her centrality,
while the number of opinions issued has no effect. This finding, along
with the borderline statistically significant result for rapporteurs, sug-
gests that direct involvement with a variety of legislative proposals
increases MEPs’ centrality more than does involvement with a limited
number of specific pieces of legislation. That is, serving as party group
coordinator (a position that entails involvement with all legislative pro-
posals in the relevant committee) and amending a greater number of
legislative proposals has a clear positive effect on an MEP’s centrality,
while the impact of serving as rapporteur or issuing opinions for second-
ary committees (both activities that entail targeted involvement with
particular pieces of legislation)24 is more tenuous or indistinguishable

from zero, respectively.25 This finding stands to reason, given that covot-
ing centrality reflects the tendency of cue-receivers to adopt the position
of cue-providers across a large number of votes, not only specific ones.
Finally, our expectations about seniority (Hypothesis 3) and ideology
(Hypothesis 4) are confirmed. More senior MEPs are more central, while
greater ideological distance to the EP median on the two primary dimen-
sion of conflict is associated with lower levels of centrality. Of the
control variables, only party size is significant and, as expected, posi-
tively associated with centrality.
These findings are notable for those interested in EP politics. More
important for our purposes, however, is that they lend credence to our
conception of covoting centrality as a measure of influence because they
make substantive sense given what we know about institutional politics
and the process of policymaking in the EP: Legislators with the greatest
signaling influence tend to be those who serve as committee coordinators
and rapporteurs, introduce amendments to a greater number of reports,
have served a greater number of EP terms, and are ideologically centrist.
Conclusion
Building on insights from the study of social networks, which

emphasizes that influence is at least partially derived from actors’ struc-
tural position in the relational context in which they are embedded, this
article measures influence as the centrality of individual lawmakers in
legislative covoting networks. This idea, of treating voting data as rela-
tional and using network structures to determine who is most centrally
located—and thus most “signaling-influential”— constitutes a novel
approach to operationalizing legislators’ influence.
Our theoretical treatment stands on two legs: a mathematical proof
and an agent-based simulation model. Both conceive of voting as a cue-
ing process, where some legislators follow others when casting their
vote, and show that cue-providers are always more central than cue-
receivers. Hence, we can measure lawmakers’ centrality and thereby
identify those whose positions influence the greatest number of col-
leagues. To illustrate the empirical utility of our propositions and to offer
a first test of our measure’s construct validity, we conduct a statistical
analysis with covoting centrality in the EP as the dependent variable.
The set of independent variables that successfully predict centrality
mesh convincingly with what we know about policymaking and voting
patterns in the EP.
Unlike other measures of influence, centrality in legislative covot-

ing networks travels easily to a great many legislatures (and beyond, to
other empirical settings where a sufficient number of votes is recorded).
This is for two reasons. First, our model is parsimonious and general in
that it does not rely on restrictive assumptions about the cueing process.
Second, voting data are often readily available. This sets our measure
apart from alternatives, like (co)sponsorship of legislation (which is not
the norm in many lawmaking bodies) and survey-based research (which
is costly and difficult to conduct). In other words, our approach offers
legislative scholars—and anybody else with access to individual-level
voting data for an identifiable number of political actors—a new tool
capable of capturing power and influence, which are amongst the most
elusive concepts for political scientists to measure.
Nils Ringe <ringe@wisc.edu> is Associate Professor and Jean

Monnet Chair and Steven Wilson <slwilson4@wisc.edu> is Ph.D.
Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI
53706.
NOTES
We are grateful to the editor, three insightful reviewers, David Canon, Cliff
Carrubba, Scott Gehlbach, Frank H€age, Joe Jupille, Dan Miodownik, Anand Sokhey,
and Jennifer Victor, as well as discussants and participants at several conferences and
workshops.
1. Readers should note this article’s online supporting information, which
provides additional supporting materials.
2. There are important exceptions to the conceptualization of voting as an atom-
istic act, most notably previous studies of voting cues (esp. Kingdon 1973; Matthews
and Stimson 1975).
3. Prominent studies of roll-call votes, for various legislatures, include Poole
and Rosenthal (1997, 2007), Morgenstern (2004), Rosenthal and Voeten (2004), and
Hix, Noury, and Roland (2007).
4. A broad literature also exists in formal theory, modeling legislative cue
provision as signaling games (e.g., Crawford and Sobel 1982; Gilligan and Krehbiel 1987).
5. As we show below, cue-providers inside the legislature are always more cen-
tral than cue-receivers as long as some internal cueing occurs, that is, as long as not all
votes are independent of one another.
6. Pearson derived the Phi coefficient on the familiar correlation coefficient.
Details on the equations used in this proof can be either found in his original work or in
more modern references such as Everitt and Skrondal (2010).
7. The complete proof is available in the online supporting information.

8. To verify the proof, we wrote software to calculate centralities for 10,000 per-
mutations of p, q, and n, which confirmed no instances of follower centrality eclipsing
that of the cue-provider.
9. Indeed, at runs with very high n, the centrality of cue-providers and followers
collapsed upon their predicted expected values, with extremely high statistical signifi-
cance distinguishing the two. Since the smallest legislatures hover right around 100
members, and our simulations at different levels of n reported in Table 1 suggest that 100
is more than sufficient n to reliably distinguish between the centrality of cue-providers
and followers, our remaining simulations use an n of 100 in order to most aggressively
test our findings. Simulations run with more members produce consistent findings but
with more stark results.
10. With an odd number of nonmajoritarians, there will always be a majority for
the majoritarian to vote with. The findings in this section are robust to having multiple
majoritarians as well, although since each majoritarian votes the same as any other, we
only show results for one majoritarian, for the sake of simplicity.
11. These results are robust to different probabilities for allies and opponents,
including asymmetric distributions, in addition to models of multiple parties with different
following probabilities. Additional graphics are available in the online supporting
information.
12. These findings are robust to different probabilities as well. In fact, we present
the worst results here, since when the probability of independents moves away from
50%, their votes actually reinforce cue-provider centrality by acting similar to allies or
opponents. Again, additional graphs are available in the online supporting information.
13. Another interesting finding is that in simulations with three or more parties,
our absolute-value approach yields higher cue-provider centrality, but the traditional
approach actually yields a majoritarian with systematically higher centrality than other
voters across all settings.
14. Most measures of centrality in the legislative context rely on like-voting percen-
tages of voters as their basis. We use correlations between legislators’ voting records instead
because it is mathematically more sound, allowing the usage of equations relying on correla-
tions in the formal proof, for instance. However, in order to demonstrate that our findings
were not simply driven by that departure from standards, we also calculated centralities based
on like-voting percentages as well as correlations. In order to mirror our absolute value
approach, we subtracted 0.5 from each like-voting percentage and then took the absolute
value (in order to reflect that like-voting of less than 50% is indicative of negative cueing,
just as negative correlations reflect the same). The correlation between the correlation
approach and like-voting approach was on average 0.99 across our thousands of simulations.
15. A table listing the most central MEPs is included in the online supporting
information.
16. An alternative approach would be relying on an exponential random graph
model (ERGM) framework, which, however, has recently been challenged (Shalizi and
Rinaldo 2013).
17. Note that the QAP regression procedure in UCINET (Borgatti, Everett, and
Freeman 2002) only provides significance levels, not standard errors. This is reflected in
the results table below.
18. Only the European Commission can introduce a legislative proposal, with
few exceptions of internal security matters, where it shares the power of initiative with
the EU member states.
19. The coordinators data comes from the EP secretariat. We ran additional mod-
els that account for largely symbolic activities that do not modify the content of
legislation, such as making speeches (see Slapin and Proksch 2010), issuing questions to
other EU institutions, and introducing motions for resolutions or written declarations. It
stands to reason that they would not affect legislators’ covoting centrality, and none
achieve statistical significance in any of the models, nor do they improve the model fit.
All activity data were provided by votewatch.eu.
20. Bureau members are important in the EP’s organizational structure, but they
tend not to participate in the negotiations of specific legislation. Data are from Høyland,
Sircar, and Hix (2009).
21. Studies of a “gender gap” show differences in political attitudes, policy prior-
ities, and voting patterns between men and women that may play a meaningful role in
legislative politics (e.g., Box-Steffensmeier, DeBoef, and Lin 2004; Seltzer, Newman,
and Leighton 1997).
22. A possible objection to this strategy is that tenure is and leadership tends to be
constant across the entire legislative term. This is not, however, a concern. Regarding
tenure, it is impossible for the causal arrow to run from centrality to tenure within a single
term because centrality calculated using votes that occurred at any point between July
2004 and June 2009 cannot predict the number of terms an MEP has served, which is a
function of elections that took place in June 2004 and, for longer-serving members, every
five years going back in time. The same logic applies to most leadership positions, which
are filled at the beginning of the term and thus cannot be predicted by votes that occur
later on. Moreover, we do not find associations between any of the leadership variables
and covoting centrality and therefore do not conclude that leadership affects centrality
(or vice versa).
23. We ran additional analyses with a variety of alternative model specifications
to ensure the robustness of our results. Variations in coefficients, p-values, and model fit
are negligible.
24. About 50% of MEPs amend five or more reports and about 25% more than
10. Only about 20% of MEPs serve as rapporteur or issue opinions more than once.
25. This is not to suggest that we do not believe rapporteurs in the lead or second-
ary committees to be influential—just that their influence is likely limited to the reports
with which they are directly involved (see also Farrell and Heretier 2003, 592).
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Supporting Information
Additional supporting information may be found in the online version

of this article:
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics
Table 2. Most Central MEP (Overall and by Party Group)
Figure 1. Leader Centrality (Shading) vs. Follower Correlations (x and
y Axes)
Figure 2. Centrality When Allies and Opponents Follow at 65% and
35%
Figure 3. Centrality When Allies and Opponents Follow at 80% and
35%
Figure 4. Centrality When Allies, Opponents, and Others Follow at
80%, 20%, and 35%
Figure 5. Kernel Densities of Correlations between Posterior Calcu-
lated Absolute Value Centrality and Prior Calculated Centralities
(1,000 Simulations, 100 Legislators, 1,000 Rounds of Voting)
Figure 6. T-Scores of Cue-Provider Centrality vs. Number of Voting
Rounds Complete Proof of Leader Centrality

Pinpointing The Powerful: Covoting Network Centrality As A Measure of Political Influence

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NILS RINGE

Pinpointing the Powerful:

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 2, May 2016 1

ﬁrst, by presenting a formal proof to show that cue-providers are always

Moreover, while we develop our concept, theory, and measure-

Measuring Legislative Influence

In the context of American legislative politics, individual legisla-

because A follows B’s lead, or vice versa. This symmetry is problematic

There are many types of centrality that can be calculated from a

the simplest approach to capture centrality, as a measure of each node’s

where wij is the weight of the relationship between i and j. In a theoretical

calculated in legislatures of different sizes. This yields our ﬁnal equation

It should be noted that any operationalization of centrality based

A Formal Proof of Cue-Provider Centrality

We hypothesize that cue-providers should always have higher cen-

We begin with our deﬁnition of centrality. In correlations between

coefﬁcient, sometimes referred to as the mean square contingency coefﬁ-

In the simplest nontrivial legislature of one cue-provider and two

Canceling out equal terms and expanding the summations

Therefore, the centrality of the cue-provider will be greater than or

/11 1/12 1/13 1/14 /12 1/22 1/23 1/24 :

Canceling out equal terms yields the following:

/13 1/14 /23 1/24 :

However, note that each of these terms is independent of the num-

We also construct an agent-based model in R, which complements

10 .25 .4869 .2633 .3649 2.136 .5 .375

As a baseline, we consider a scenario that only involves the cue-

round. Repeated simulations demonstrate that, despite this

this point, we ran repeated simulations to estimate the number of voting

Betweenness (B) 1 0.51 0.68 0.66 0.15

Betweenness (B) 1 0.6 0.58 0.25 20.02

Betweenness (B) 1 0.55 0.43 0.3 20.04

correlated highly with our measure, unlike closeness and weighted

conﬁrm the robustness of the formal proof’s ﬁnding to the noise of

Applying the Concept: Predicting Covoting Centrality in the EP

The empirical analysis we present in this section has two objec-

Because our dependent variable, covoting centrality, is a social net-

legislation and cross-party compromises are constructed in committee

The EP’s decentralized decision-making process also entails that

H4: The covoting centrality of those legislators who are close to

Coordinator 0.0246 0.041 0.025 0.042

Intercept 0.1821 1.00 0.1858 1.00

Model 2 drops all insigniﬁcant predictors. The results are consistent

particular pieces of legislation)24 is more tenuous or indistinguishable

Building on insights from the study of social networks, which

Unlike other measures of inﬂuence, centrality in legislative covot-

Nils Ringe <ringe@wisc.edu> is Associate Professor and Jean

7. The complete proof is available in the online supporting information.

Additional supporting information may be found in the online version

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