Legislative Choices Research Articles

Perceptions of Decisional Referents in Legislative Decisionmaking

Previous studies of American legislative behavior have postulated that legislators seek to maximize certain values in their choice-making behavior and to minimize others. Using data collected in Iowa, this study examines the rankings given to six such middle-range values, labelled decisional referents or criteria-state interests, district interests, legislator's conscience, governor's preferences, political parties, and interest groups-by three types of political actors-legislators, political influentials, and the public. Through a paired comparison technique, the preferences among these criteria are ranked and then compared for each type of respondent. Similar rankings of these middle-range values by legislators, political influentials, and the public are used as evidence toward confirming a belief-sharing linkage model between representatives and various types of constituents. Legislative involvement in political decisionmaking is a widely recognized feature of American political systems; however, political science studies of legislative choice making have tended to focus either on specific decisions, using a case study approach, or on factors affecting macrolevel decisions,

The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law

This chapter shows how the American doctrine, allows to the judiciary the power to declare legislative Acts unconstitutional, and to treat them as null, come about, and explores what is the true scope of it? Within that margin, as among all these legislative considerations, the constitutional law-makers must be allowed a free foot. As legislative choice, ranging unfettered, may select one form of action or another, the judges must not interfere, since their question is a naked judicial one. Moreover, such is the nature of this particular judicial question that the preliminary determination by the legislature is a fact of very great importance, since the constitutions expressly intrust to the legislature this determination; they cannot act without making it. Furthermore, the constitutions not merely intrust to the legislatures a preliminary determination of the question, but they contemplate that this determination may be the final one; for they secure no revision of it.