This project is a collaboration of Garret Binding (IPZ, University of Zürich), Lucas Leemann (IPZ, University of Zürich), Hannes Weber (Tamedia), and Barnaby Skinner (Tamedia).
The detailed report can be found here: Link to report (in German).
The goal of this project was to estimate the ideological position of the various fractions in the lower house in Switzerland. Models were estimated seprately for various issue areas allowing to see whether the political landscape varies by domain.
To estimate the ideological positions we use uni-dimensional IRT models (described in more detail in the text). We relied on R and Stan to estimate these models.
The two files with the roll call data were generated by Hannes Weber. They are compressed and need to be un-zipped before running the code (see here: link to data).
Based on the analysis here Hannes Weber wrote an article that was published in Tages Anzeiger (and other Tamedia newspapers), see here: link to article.
The course content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.