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This paper formulates and estimates a rigorously-justified linear probability model of binary choices over alternatives characterized by unobserved attributes. The model is applied to estimate preferences of congressmen as expressed in their votes on bills. The effective dimension of the attribute space characterizing votes is larger than what has been estimated in recent influential studies of voting by Poole and Rosenthal. Congressmen vote on more than ideology. Issue-specific attributes are an important determinant of congressional voting patterns. The estimated dimension is too large for the median voter model to describe voting
Heckman et al. (Wed,) studied this question.