TY - JOUR
T1 - How Large is Congressional Dependence in Agriculture? Bayesian Inference about 'Scale' and 'Scope' in Measuring a Spatial Externality
AU - Holloway, Garth
AU - Lacombe, Donald J.
AU - Shaughnessy, Timothy M.
PY - 2014/6
Y1 - 2014/6
N2 - The political economy literature on agriculture emphasises influence over political outcomes via lobbying conduits in general, political action committee contributions in particular, and the pervasive view that political preferences with respect to agricultural issues are inherently geographic. In this context, 'interdependence' in Congressional vote behaviour manifests itself in two dimensions. One dimension is the intensity by which neighbouring vote propensities influence one another, and the second is the geographic extent of voter influence. We estimate these facets of dependence using data on a Congressional vote on the 2001 Farm Bill using routine Markov chain Monte-Carlo procedures and Bayesian model averaging, in particular. In so doing, we develop a novel procedure to examine both the reliability and the consequences of different model representations for measuring both the 'scale' and the 'scope' of spatial (geographic) co-relations in voting behaviour.
AB - The political economy literature on agriculture emphasises influence over political outcomes via lobbying conduits in general, political action committee contributions in particular, and the pervasive view that political preferences with respect to agricultural issues are inherently geographic. In this context, 'interdependence' in Congressional vote behaviour manifests itself in two dimensions. One dimension is the intensity by which neighbouring vote propensities influence one another, and the second is the geographic extent of voter influence. We estimate these facets of dependence using data on a Congressional vote on the 2001 Farm Bill using routine Markov chain Monte-Carlo procedures and Bayesian model averaging, in particular. In so doing, we develop a novel procedure to examine both the reliability and the consequences of different model representations for measuring both the 'scale' and the 'scope' of spatial (geographic) co-relations in voting behaviour.
KW - Bayesian model averaging
KW - Bayesian spatial probit
KW - Congressional vote dependence
KW - Markov chain Monte-Carlo methods
KW - PAC contributions and their effectiveness
KW - Political economy
KW - Spatial correlations
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84899951665&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1477-9552.12054
DO - 10.1111/1477-9552.12054
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84899951665
VL - 65
SP - 463
EP - 484
JO - Journal of Agricultural Economics
JF - Journal of Agricultural Economics
SN - 0021-857X
IS - 2
ER -