ABSTRACT
Scores of articles have made serious use of NOMINATE coordinates in the study of American politics. The NOMINATE estimation procedures have also been applied independently to state legislatures and other voting bodies. Jeffery A. Jenkins and Nokken found that sincere spatial models accounted for the voting. The work of Jenkins and his coauthors assesses strategic voting on the basis of NOMINATE coordinates estimated from an entire legislature or set of legislatures. There is an active debate as to the extent to which parties discipline their members' voting beyond the discipline that is reflected in the overall ideological position or NOMINATE score. To attack this issue, Hager and Jeffrey Talbert used NOMINATE scores directly. Snyder and Groseclose used an alternative scaling technique. David W. Brady and Hahrie Han present evidence that preferences on issues polarized in terms of partisan identification and presidential voting before the recent period of polarization in Congress.
