House Voting Research Articles

Decision-Making on Roll Call Votes in the House of Representatives

This article explores notions of contextual decision-making in congressional floor voting, based on structured interviews with 80 House Members. The research documents that congressmen make up their minds in different ways on different kinds of votes. Decision-making was found to be variegated; the major distinction is between high and low profile votes. The article also offers an optimistic assessment of the potential for constituency/representative linkages in House voting.

Explaining House Voting on Energy Policy: Ideology and the Conditional Effects of Party and District Economic Interests

Explaining House Voting on Energy Policy: Ideology and the Conditional Effects of Party and District Economic Interests

The Fiction of Congressional Elections as Presidential Events

Contemporary research suggests that voters often base midterm congressional election choices on their evaluations of the president. In short, midterm congressional elections are seen as referenda on presidential popularity. The referendum notion does not, however, adequately address nonpresidential variables, which may be key determinants of the vote. Employing a longitudinal analysis of House and Senate voting in the 1970, 1974, and 1978 elections, this study considers the relative, simultaneous effects of presidential popularity, congressional incumbency, party identification, and voters' perceptions of the candidates. The results indicate that presidential popularity is a relatively weak predictor of individual congressional voting decisions, when nonpresidential variables are also considered. The impact is slightly greater in 1970 and 1974 than in 1978. There also appears to be a somewhat larger effect for Senate than House voting. Yet in all instances, the nonpresidential variables are the major predictors of the congressional vote.

Defense Spending and Defense Voting in the House: An Empirical Study of an Aspect of the Military-Industrial Complex Thesis

In an attempt to investigate systematically one aspect of the military-industrial complex thesis, several measures of the impact of defense spending on congressional districts were developed and correlated with two Guttman scales of House voting on defense and foreign policy issues. The party and region of the representatives were controlled. While for the House as a whole there was little support for the hypothesis that representatives from districts highly dependent on defense spending were more likely than representatives from nondependent districts to vote for jingoistic foreign and defense policies, certain subgroups such as the very senior members did evidence such correlation between defense spending concentrations and voting. These results are discussed in terms of pluralist, elitist, and other theories of societal governance.

Political Upheaval and Congressional Voting: The Effects of the 1960s on Voting Patterns in the House of Representatives

IF THE U.S HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES is truly a representative body, major societal and political changes should have an effect on voting patterns in that body. The twelve year period 1959-70 saw relative political quiescence give way to the Civil Rights Movement, then to the war in Viet Nam and the peace movement, which radicalized some and led many to question old priorities at home and abroad. The political worlds of 1959 and 1970 were very different. The purpose of this study is to show that, during this period, major changes in House voting patterns did occur and to test a number of hypotheses which could explain the change.