Key Votes Research Articles

Network modelling as a tool for cyber diplomacy

ABSTRACT Visual representations of votes at the UN can assist cyber diplomacy practitioners, researchers and stakeholders in communicating and interpreting voting behaviour. The colour-coded maps that were first used to represent key votes now struggle to capture the complexity and nuances of the cumulative voting record. This article critically examines visualisation methods that have been used in the past. It introduces the advantages of a network model approach and demonstrates how it can be used to visualise a series of diplomacy votes at the UN. Finally, it describes how community detection algorithms can be applied to the network models to identify and better understand middle ground countries in cyber diplomacy.

Contesting the West? Domestic Contestation in Bulgarian Foreign Policy From 2014 to 2022

Abstract This article addresses the evolution of Bulgarian foreign policy since the start of the Russian Ukrainian crisis of 2014 until 2022 through the prism of domestic contestation of foreign policy choices and decisions. The article reviews four key votes that took place during the period that related to NATO decisions and EU-related decisions towards the situation in Ukraine. This article raises three central questions. First: to what extent were Bulgarian foreign policy decisions related to NATO and the EU increasingly contested and politicized in domestic politics? Second: what is the impact of domestic political dynamics in terms of fragmentation, coalition building and role of smaller fringe extreme right political parties on the growing politicization and contestation of Bulgarian foreign policy towards NATO and the EU? Third: to what extent might such politicization and contestation question Bulgaria’s commitments to both NATO and the EU?

How congressional leaders define loyalty: validating US House party voting scores with party leadership records

ABSTRACT Measures of party unity are commonplace in the study of legislative voting, particularly in assessments of party influence. Scholars have employed a range of measures in studying loyalty and reward in the U.S. House, but all are proxies for the scores that House party leaders construct for their own processes. These loyalty scores have never been examined in empirical scholarship. Drawing on archived leadership records, I construct leader loyalty scores for House Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s based on leadership-selected key votes in each session. I show that the content of the leader lists was very sensitive to political context as the leadership responded to short-term challenges, but in the aggregate, leader loyalty scores are closely related over time to other indicators. As predictors of party rewards—in the form of committee posts and legislative success—the leadership’s measure provides some clearer evidence of reward, particularly in comparison to conventional party unity scores.

State Legislation Restricting and Enabling Local Governments in an Era of Preemption

This paper assesses state efforts to both restrict and enable local government discretion by using data from Project Vote Smart's “Key Votes” database. The results show that state legislation, both successful and unsuccessful, is more likely to limit local autonomy than to enhance it, although both tendencies occur. Republican legislators are more likely to support efforts to restrict discretion than Democrats are. Further, preemption attempts are particularly evident on “hot button” issues, such as guns, sexuality and gender roles, and immigration, although such initiatives are not necessarily more likely to successfully become law, especially under conditions of divided government.

The political allocation of green pork and its implications for federal climate policy

This paper examines how the simultaneous choice of an emissions cap and the allocation of permits to secure key votes affects the ability for climate policy to pass the U.S. Congress and the conditional efficiency and equity of such feasible policies. When permits are politically allocated, Congress selects a cap both for the external benefits it provides as well as the private green pork, or value of permits, it generates. Legislative bargaining in contexts when public and private goods are co-produced, such as climate change, induces trade-offs between policy passage and conditional efficiency and equity. Moreover, lowering the vote threshold or originating climate policy in the Senate results in a policy that is more vulnerable to unanticipated deviations in the winning coalition.

The party politics of the EU’s relations with the USA: evidence from the European Parliament

ABSTRACT The USA is one of the “geopolitical others” of the European Union. Different geopolitical worldviews and normative commitments, therefore, often clash when relations with the USA are at stake. Whereas most analyses focus on differences between EU member states and their foreign policy traditions, this paper examines to what extent and in what way politicisation is driven by party politics by studying roll call votes in the European Parliament (EP) between 2004 and 2019. We find evidence that transatlantic relations have become more politicised. We show that voting behaviour is influenced first and foremost by MEPs’ affiliation with one of the political groups, not by their nationality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that support for the USA follows a bell-curve where centrist political groups are most supportive of the USA and political groups at the far ends of the left/right spectrum are most critical. Policies towards the USA are also related to the “new politics” dimension that pits cosmopolitans against nationalists, but the correlation is weaker than the one with the traditional left/right dimension. We examine the arguments brought forward in support for political groups’ voting behaviour by analysing the parliamentary debates preceding key votes on EU-US relations.

Sexism as a political force: The impact of gender‐based attitudes on the presidential elections of 2012 and 2016

AbstractObjectiveThis article examines the effect of gender attitudes on the voting behavior of whites in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.MethodsLogistic regression models are used to analyze data from the 2012 and 2016 waves of the American National Election Study.ResultsSexist orientations had a greater impact on how Americans, and white Americans in particular, voted in 2016 than in 2012. Attitudes toward gender roles and feminism affected the voting behavior of white men and white women in a highly similar fashion in 2016 but had a greater effect on the voting behavior of college—as opposed to noncollege‐educated whites.ConclusionMany observers have argued that the mobilization of sexist voters over the course of the 2016 campaign helped carry Trump to victory. The results of this analysis indicate that, in regard to many key voting blocs, the activation of sexism cost Trump at least as many votes as he gained as due to the countermobilization of nonsexist white voters, particularly those with college degrees. The strength of the nonsexist backlash suggests a need to reassess the received wisdom that sexism among white voters played to Trump's advantage in the 2016 election.

What Matters Most to Student Voters?: A Conjoint Analysis of Political Candidate Attributes

Election is an essential instrument in the development of the country. Understanding key voting preferences could resolve issues facing the country through competent elected government officials. The election of future competent officials depends on the preference of the next generation of voters. This study aims to determine how political candidate attributes affect the voting preference of students and determine which of the political candidate attributes is the most important. The study used choice-based conjoint analysis, which simulates the real-world decision-making of choosing a candidate. Students were presented with different presidential candidates, each with a unique set of demographic and political attributes to choose from. Results suggest that student voters give importance to political attributes that reflect competencies such as profession, experience, accomplishments, and priorities. Political leaders must build their image through competence and good governance among student voters.

Vandenberg Vanished: US Congress and the Politicisation of Military Interventions

Abstract This article examines the extent and patterns of politicisation in the field of military interventions for the USA after the end of the Cold War. The analysis shows that key votes on war and peace in the US Congress are contested to a higher degree than in the European parliaments. It finds that Republican members of Congress (MoC) are in general more supportive of military interventions than Democrats. At the same time, party loyalty towards the president influences the level of support. Furthermore, an original content analysis of congressional debates reveals that MoC use specific argumentative frames in line with partisan ideology. Both parts of the analysis point to the relevance of partisanship and partisan ideology for understanding the politicisation of military interventions policies. Thus, the traditional bipartisan spirit, paradigmatically invoked by US Senator Arthur Vandenberg during the Cold War, has almost vanished.

Political Capital in the 21st Century: Presidential Grassroots Lobbying Organizations in the Obama Administration

This article advances the study of presidential leadership by analyzing the circumstances under which Organizing for America/Organizing for Action (OFA) mobilized core supporters of President Barack Obama for policy purposes using digital tools and other resources developed for the president’s election campaign. I argue that the policy mobilization efforts of such presidential grassroots lobbying organizations (PGLOs) are constrained by electoral opportunity costs and innate factors which lead PGLOs to be most effective at maintaining the support of presidential copartisans in Congress. These constraints are used to develop several hypotheses about the timing and frequency of OFA grassroots lobbying mobilization efforts, which are tested using a dataset of 245 OFA mobilization requests to supporters sent via e-mail from January 2009 through January 2017. The resulting analysis finds support for several of these hypotheses, as well as the proposition that PGLO grassroots lobbying efforts carry electoral costs. Furthermore, it supports the claim that OFA leadership were most willing to pay the costs of lobbying mobilization when President Obama’s copartisans set the agenda in Congress under unified government and OFA mobilization of Democratic “super-activists” could have most easily kept presidential priorities under consideration. Rather than judging them on their ability to mobilize the mass public and coerce opposition legislators to side with the President on key votes, I argue that these findings support a reevaluation of OFA and similar groups' effectiveness on the basis of their ability to unify and motivate the president's co-partisan allies in Congress.

Ideological Primary Competition and Congressional Behavior

Primary challenges on an incumbent’s more extreme flank have become increasingly common in congressional elections. We explore the consequences on the legislative behavior of successful incumbents following these types of challenges. We propose that the effect of extreme ideological primary challenges is conditioned on whether the member belongs to the majority or the minority party. We test our expectations on primary elections from 2000 to 2012 and corresponding changes in voting behavior in the next Congress. We find that incumbents in the majority party who have defeated an extreme ideological primary challenge are less likely to support their party, especially on key votes. We expect this reaction is because they fear appearing too moderate and thereby encouraging another extreme ideological primary challenge. We find that incumbents in the minority party who face an extreme ideological challenge do not change their general voting behavior, but are more likely to vote with their party on key votes.

Northern Ireland: Double Triumph for the Democratic Unionist Party

The General Election result in Northern Ireland impacted across the UK. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) enjoyed a double victory. It extended dominance of the unionist community and collected a bigger prize as its ten MPs (a record tally) held a pivotal position at Westminster. In holding the balance of power in the House of Commons, the DUP was not shy in articulating its price for supporting the otherwise friendless Conservative government in key votes, extracting £1 billion of new funding for Northern Ireland. The DUP’s hegemonic position within its unionist constituency was matched by Sinn Féin’s obliteration of its Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) rival within the nationalist community, but without any obvious reward for republicans. At a time of considerable instability, with Northern Ireland’s political institutions undergoing one of their episodic crises, unionist and nationalist voters overwhelmingly backed the dominant representative forces within their respective ethno-national blocs. This analysis of the election draws upon data from the 2017 Economic and Social Research Council’s Northern Ireland General Election study to examine why the DUP and Sinn Féin dominated the contest and looks at the implications of the outcome in Northern Ireland and at Westminster.1

Voting Behaviour in the European Parliament and Economic Governance Reform: Does Nationality Matter?

This paper analyses MEPs’ voting behaviour on all regulations and directives forming the Six-Pack and the Two-Pack together with the key vote required to establish the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). Whereas scholarly work has traditionally showed MEPs voting behaviour to be primarily driven by ideology (more specifically, by the MEP’s party group affiliation), we expect to find MEPs’ national origins to play a counterbalancing role and – at least partially – weaken intra-party position on key economic governance matters, where a conflict of interest might exist between creditor and debtor member countries. Findings confirm that national interests and country-level economic variables can predict MEPs’ votes in a considerable number of cases, opening new avenues for future research on territorial cleavages in the European Parliament.

Loyalty to the Leadership: Validating Congressional Party Voting Scores with Party Leadership Records

Measures of party unity are commonplace in the study of legislative voting, particularly in assessments of party influence. Although scholars have employed a range of measures in studying party loyalty and reward in the U.S. House, all are proxies for the scores that House party leaders construct for their own processes, and these scores have never been examined in empirical scholarship. Drawing on archived leadership records, I construct leader loyalty scores for House Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s based on leadership-selected key votes in each session. I show that the content of the leader lists is very sensitive to political context as the leadership responds to short-term challenges, but in the aggregate, leader loyalty scores are closely related over time to other indicators. And, as predictors of party rewards—in the form of committee posts and legislative success—the leaders’ scores generally perform similarly to the usual proxies, although the leadership's measure provides clearer evidence of reward, particularly in comparison to conventional party unity scores.

Substantive Black Political Representation: Evidence from Matching Estimates in the United States House of Representatives

I seek to determine whether race is a factor in how black representatives vote in the United States House of Representatives; if so, this suggests electing more black representatives may improve the economic and political position of blacks if policy positions taken by black representatives on bills that fail to pass would provide tangible positive impacts to members of the black community if passed. Confounding the impact of legislator race, districts represented by blacks on average are quite different than those represented by whites. While past research on this topic uses linear regression techniques with undesirable properties, I improve on past research using matching techniques with more desirable properties. Utilizing a combination of Mahalanobis and propensity score matching, within-caliper matching, and exact matching using data from the 100th–113th Congress, I show black representatives are more likely to vote in agreement with the majority of the Congressional Black Caucus on all votes and on Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Americans for Democratic Action, and Congressional Quarterly key votes, indicating a substantive racial impact on roll-call voting.

Measuring Congressional Partisanship on Energy and the Environment in the Age of Obama: The Cases of Offshore Drilling in Alaska and the Keystone XL Pipeline

The hypothesis for this article is that partisan voting in the US Congress since the 1980s prompts the need to confirm it empirically as a baseline for exploring other variables that may influence public policy decisions. It is worthwhile to measure that partisanship in two key energy-environmental policies during the Obama Presidency. First, how did partisan voting affect the decision by Shell to cease offshore exploratory drilling in the Arctic in 2015? Moreover, was partisanship a factor in President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that year? I found the degrees of congressional partisanship to be very high on key votes in both cases, but relatively lower in the Keystone case. The inference is that legislative party politics can offer a partial explanation for policy continuity or change. These findings set the stage for further inquiry on other explanatory variables both within and external to the political system.

Presidential Electoral Influence in Congressional Districts, Public Approval, and Presidential Success in Congress

Other SectionsAbstractPUBLIC APPROVAL AND PRESIDENTIAL LEGISLATIVE INFLUENCEDATA AND METHODFINDINGSCONCLUSIONFigureTableReference

The 2011 Debt-Ceiling Controversy and the 2012 US House Elections

ABSTRACTThis article considers how a key legislative vote—that is, the August 2011 vote to raise the federal debt ceiling—influenced the 2012 elections for the US House of Representatives. Two outcomes are analyzed: (1) the incumbents’ ability to retain their seats through the 2012 general election, and (2) their share of the two-party vote for members who faced a general-election competitor. In developing this study, the research design was registered and released publicly before the votes were counted in 2012. Therefore, this article also illustrates how study preregistration can work in practice for political science. The findings show that seat retention did not vary with the treatment; however, incumbents who voted against raising the debt ceiling earned an additional 2.4 percentage points of the two-party vote.

Voting for a Founding: Testing the Effect of Economic Interests at the Federal Convention of 1787

Previous work measuring the voting patterns of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention largely focused on either individual delegate positions for a handful of key votes or on state delegation positions for a far broader set of votes. We remedy this limitation by modeling the key first two months of the Convention including both some individual-level and all delegation-level voting, while simultaneously estimating the effect of various economic interests on that voting, controlling for various cultural and ideological factors. The findings suggest that economic factors mattered a great deal at the Convention. The effect of such interests vary however by the dimension of debate—representation, national institutional design, or federalism. We conclude that economic interests exerted a powerful influence on the deep structure of voting at Convention, though not consistently by issue or dimension. Specific interests only mattered on specific dimensions.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act and Votes of Confidence

The Government in the UK rests for its continuation in office on the confidence of the House of Commons. Until 2011, it was a convention of the constitution that a Government defeated on a motion of confidence resigned or requested the dissolution of Parliament. There were different categories of confidence votes. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 puts on a statutory basis the conditions for a general election following the loss of an explicitly worded motion of no confidence. Although not intended to do so initially, the provisions of the Act limit the options available to the Prime Minister in the event of a vote of no confidence and in so doing removed a significant power to maximise parliamentary strength in key votes.