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Many of the questions that are central to political science involve understanding either the causes or consequences of policy change. Scholars have relied on both data-driven and model-driven approaches to characterize the content and direction of policy. This review briefly describes several prominent measures from each approach, and it highlights important limitations that scholars continue to face in the hope of prompting continued contributions to this difficult, but essential, task.

Measuring the preferences of political elites is critically important for analyzing the determinants and consequences of elite behavior. The decisions that elites make when casting roll call votes seem to provide an ideal opportunity for measuring elite preferences and testing theories of the political process. The fact that the resulting ideal points are a consequence of applying a statistical model to a model of individual choice, however, may affect their usefulness for measuring elite preferences and testing predictions regarding individual and collective decision making. When analyzing roll call votes, scholars should be mindful of how their decisions may affect the estimates from their analyses. I use simulations to illustrate how the nonrandom selection of roll calls may affect the ability to estimate ideal points that accurately reflect the preferences responsible for generating the observed votes, and I discuss work integrating the many models involved in the production and consumption of roll call estimates. Adapted from the source document.

Lawmaking studies and evaluations of competing accounts of policy change cannot easily assess the nature of policy change due to the difficulty of locating the status quo and proposals relative to the preferences of critical political actors. Focusing on activity involving the Fair Labor Standards Act, I investigate how the attempted and successful policy change between the 92nd Congress (1971-72) and the 106th Congress (1999-2000) compares to the predicted lawmaking activity according to dominant lawmaking models. Characterizing the incidence and magnitude of policy change over nearly 30 years reveals that policy change is rarer and smaller than current theories predict. Change occurs when the status quo is more extreme than the preferences of the pivot most supportive of the status quo according to supermajoritarian models, but there are many instances where similarly extreme status quos are left unchanged. Moreover, when change occurs, it exhibits a strong status quo bias and the outcome is often indistinguishable from the preferences of the pivot who most prefers the status quo. Adapted from the source document.