Theories of parties and lawmaking typically require measures of legislators' preferences for empirical analysis. However, existing methods for generating estimates of these preferences presume that legislators care only about their own policy preferences and not about their constituency or party...

Using Eurovision Song Contest data from the years 1957 to 2009, we analyze voting biases of the participating countries in an attempt to answer the question: “Is it about music or politics?” More specifically with this study we show that determine states’ affinity toward one another and...