The Geometry of Multidimensional Quadratic Utility in Models of Parliamentary Roll Call Voting

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how the geometry of the quadratic utility function in the standard spatial model of choice can be exploited to estimate a model of parliamentary roll call voting. In a standard spatial model of parliamentary roll call voting, the legislator votes for the policy outcome corresponding to Yea if her utility for Yea is greater than her utility for Nay. The voting decision of the legislator is modeled as a function of the difference between these two utilities. With quadratic utility, this difference has a simple geometric interpretation that can be exploited to estimate legislator ideal points and roll call parameters in a standard framework where the stochastic portion of the utility function is normally distributed. The geometry is almost identical to that used by Poole (2000) to develop a nonparametric unfolding of binary choice data and the algorithms developed by Poole (2000) can be easily modified to implement the standard maximum-likelihood model.