Variations in Voting Blocs Across Policy Fields

Abstract

to policy, have generally concerned themselves either with an undifferentiated group of roll calls or with roll calls in a single policy area. The question arises whether legislative voting blocs, as derived from a general sample of policy roll calls, are identically constituted when specific subsample policy areas are considered separately. Investigators have analyzed voting relationships within pairs of legislators, judges, nations, and other decison-making units.' These methods, derived from the early work of Rice2 and Beyle,3 can be applied to the task of drawing bloc-maps portraying the vote agreement location of legislators relative to their colleagues. What is proposed here is to employ voting agreement indices of pairs of legislators to investigate variations in the configurations of voting blocs on a variety of policy areas at issue in the same legislative session.4 The study will begin by establishing voting blocs based on all roll calls chosen for analysis, using the voting agreement indices of each legislative pair. Following this, the study will analyze variations that may occur in the blocs as various issue areas are extracted from the total body of roll calls. The study will thus allow conclusions as to the policy orientations of legislators and the stability of blocs across several policy areas.