Replication Data for: Roll-Call Voting Under Random Seating Assignment

Social connections between individuals can profoundly impact their political behavior. A growing body of research on legislative politics examines how spatial proximity to fellow legislators affects voting behavior within the institution. However, studies that examine this question often suffer from a fundamental identification problem in which proximity effects may reflect actual behavioral diffusion between members or, instead, homophily, in which legislators of a similar political feather flock together. We overcome this observational equivalence by exploiting a unique random seating lottery for seating assignments in the world's oldest existing parliament, Iceland's national legislature, Alþingi. Utilizing this naturally-occurring randomization, we employ spatial analyses of more than 20,000 estimates of spatial dependence and find little evidence that seating proximity leads to similar voting behavior by members in this legislative context.

个体间的社会联结会对其政治行为产生深远影响。当前立法政治领域的大量研究，均聚焦于议员与同僚的空间邻近度如何影响其在议会内部的投票行为。然而，此类研究往往面临根本性的识别难题：空间邻近度所产生的效应，既可能源于议员间真实存在的行为扩散，也可能仅为同质性效应——即政治立场相近的议员自然聚集在一起。针对这一观测等价问题，我们依托全球现存最古老议会——冰岛国家议会阿尔庭（Alþingi）的独特随机座位抽签分配机制开展研究。借助这一天然随机化实验设计，我们对超2万项空间依赖性估计结果开展空间分析，结果显示：在该议会场景中，座位邻近度几乎未对议员的投票一致性产生显著影响。