The Dimensional Structure of Policy Outputs: Distributive Policy and Roll Call Voting

Abstract

Policy proposals begin life in the legislative arena as high-dimensional ideas that are reduced to a single evaluative dimension by the time they are decided on the legislative floor. While roll-call decisions in Congress are largely unidimensional, little is known about the dimensional structure of policy outputs. Do policy outputs reflect a high-dimensional environment or a low-dimensional structure similar to the legislative floor? This article proposes. a theory of policy outputs and investigates this question by examining the dimensional structure of policy outputs. The results indicate that outputs are fundamentally multidimensional.