POLS 6386 MEASUREMENT THEORY
Eighth Assignment
Due 4 April 2001

1. Continuing our Lieberman project, you need to download all the Senate roll call votes taken to date from:
   
   U.S. Congress Web Site (Thomas)
   
   As of 27 March 2001 there were 48 votes cast in the Senate. Repeat the steps you took in part (3) of Homework 7 to get the roll call voting matrix. Use the new header file below to create SEN107Y.ORD.
   
   New Header file for 107^th Senate
   
   This new header file has Senator Lieberman's new ID number in it.
   
   
   1. Print SEN107Y.ORD out and turn it in.
      
      
   2. Run SEN107Y.ORD through PERFL in one and two dimensions. Use SPSS to make a graph of the two dimensional results. Label Senators Lieberman, Helms, McCain, Feingold, Kennedy, Lott, Hagel, Wellstone, and Stabenow in the plot. Analyze the two dimensional structure -- does it make any sense?
      
      
   3. Analyze the fit of the roll call votes taken on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill (S.27) to the two dimensional structure.
      
      
2. In this problem we are going to merge the 107^th roll calls into the combined data matrix for the 105^th and 106^th Senates -- SEN0506.ORD. To do this, download the program LIEBER and its control card file LIEBER.DAT.
   
   Program to Combine S0506.ORD and SEN107Y.ORD
   
   Control Card File for LIEBER.EXE
   
   Place LIEBER.EXE and LIEBER.DAT in the directory \RCHTMS107\. Note that the only thing in LIEBER.DAT is the number of roll calls -- 48 (or larger by next week!!). In future homeworks we can continue this experiment by simply increasing this number as the Senate casts more votes. To merge the 107^th roll calls simply type
   
   LIEBER.EXE
   
   and it will create the combined data matrix for the 105^th, 106^th, and 107^th Senates -- SEN0507.ORD.
   
   
   1. We are going to start by running SEN0507.ORD through PERFL. The control card file for a one dimensional scaling should look like this:

      
      SEN0507.ORD
      NON-PARAMETRIC MULTIDIMENSIONAL UNFOLDING
          1 1332   10   19    1
      (3X,9A1,7X,4A1,2X,6A1,5X,3600I1)
      (I5,1X,19A1,2I5,50F8.3)
      

   2. Run PERFL in one, two, and three dimensions. Report the one, two, and three dimensional correct classification percentages and use Excel to make a graph of the eigenvalues of the double-centered squared distance matrix computed from the agreement scores from the combined matrix.
      
      
   3. Use SPSS to make a graph of the two dimensional results of the combined scaling. Recall that Lieberman has two points! -- one constraining him to be at the same point for the 105^th and calendar 1999 (1^st session of the 106^th, and one for calendar 2000 (2^nd session of the 106^th) and the 107^th to date. Highlight Lieberman's ideal points on all of your plots and show the location of the Senators listed in part (1) above.
      
      
3. Use HOUSYM2 to get an agreement score matrix for SEN0507.ORD. Run the agreement score matrix through KYST. Report the one, two, and three dimensional STRESS values and use Excel to compute the correlations between the two and three dimensional coordinates from KYST with those from PERFL. Report the correlations one dimension at a time for each dimensionality using the format below:

   
   
         One Dimension Scalings
             PERF 1d    KYST 1d         WNOM 1d
   ------------------------------------------------
   PERF 1d  1		
   KYST 1d	-0.92682	1	
   WNOM 1d	-0.95408	0.990908	1
   
   
         Two Dimensional Scalings
    	1 PERF 2d	1 KYST 2d	1 WNOM 2d
   -------------------------------------------------
   1 PERF 2d	1		
   1 KYST 2d	0.99034	1	
   1 WNOM 2d	1	0.99034 	1
   
    	2 PERF 2d	2 KYST 2d	2 WNOM 2d
   -------------------------------------------------
   2 PERF 2d	1		
   2 KYST 2d	0.592688	1	
   2 WNOM 2d	1	0.592688	1
   
                     etc.