Legislative Voting Dynamics in Ukraine

Abstract

Current work in roll call modeling focuses on the legislative decision process and does not take advantage of the dynamic nature of legislation. Some political systems, such as Ukraine’s Verkovna Rada, are inherently dynamic, and should be modeled as such. In the model proposed, the entire legislative body is modeled together and bills are viewed as a dynamic process. This model requires no contextual information about individual legislators and predicts the amount of favorable votes a bill will receive within 6.2%, on average. Additionally, we find differences in behavior of bills proposed by the President and those proposed by parliament members or the Cabinet. This work only uses a simple differential model, opening the door to the use of more complex models capable of leveraging contextual information in the future.

This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) through a MURI Grant N00014-17-1-2675, and the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organization Systems (CASOS). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research or the U.S. government. Thomas Magelinski was also supported by an ARCS Foundation scholarship.