Bayesian Item Response Theory in Politics

Bayesian item response theory (IRT) in political science measures latent traits — such as ideology, level of democracy, or political knowledge — from observed binary or ordinal items, treating each item's response probability as a function of a respondent's position on the latent scale. Formalized for politics by Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers (2004) for roll-call votes and extended by Treier and Jackman (2008) to measure democracy as a latent variable, the approach combines item characteristic curves with prior distributions and estimates everything jointly by Markov chain Monte Carlo, yielding full posterior uncertainty for every subject's latent score.