Legislative Voting Research Articles

A Simple Model of Legislator and News Media Interaction

This article examines the effect of a strategic news media on legislators' interactions with their constituencies. Specifically, legislators can only be constrained by constituency preferences over policies when voters have the information to hold legislators accountable for their actions. A strategic news media can provide such information in a constant and continuous manner unlike, say, challengers. This article addresses this scenario with several models. First, a signaling model is introduced with constituency preferences and a journalist's investigating and reporting strategies serving as constraints on a legislator's voting preferences. Results of the baseline model include a pooling equilibrium where legislators vote with the district and are always re-elected. Second, a basic ultimatum bargaining model is introduced to allow for collusion between journalists and legislators in the output of the news product. This extension highlights a pure strategy-separating equilibrium where an out-of-step legislator is able to secure silence from the journalist and win re-election. Finally, the role of multiple journalists covering a legislator is considered. Results illustrate that as the number of media outlets increases within a district, the quality of representation also increases.

Political Parties and Governors as Determinants of Legislative Behavior in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2006

AbstractThis article examines the relative importance of regional and national forces in shaping the behavior of Brazilian legislators at the national level. A widely held view is that national legislators respond to state pressures in making decisions, rather than pressures from the national government. Governors not only can influence national debates but also can determine outcomes by exerting control over their states' legislative delegations. This article examines a dataset of all roll-call votes in the Chamber of Deputies between 1989 and 2006 to isolate and evaluate the impact of local pressures on legislative voting. Spanning the terms of five presidents and five different congresses, the data show that the local influence is weaker than the national on the voting decisions of individual legislators and the voting cohesion of state delegations. Alternative institutional resources allow the central government to counteract the centrifugal pressures of federalism and other institutional influences.

Representation in U.S. Legislatures: The Acquisition and Analysis of U.S. State Legislative Roll-Call Data

AbstractRoll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.

Attitudes toward a primary seat belt law among adults in a rural state with a secondary seat belt law

Problem Enforced primary seatbelt laws can reduce morbidity and mortality associated with motor-vehicle crashes. Constituent support is an important factor associated with legislator voting behavior toward injury prevention laws. Little is known about attitudes toward a primary seat belt law among adults in rural states without a primary seat belt law. Methods Data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey, a telephone survey of a representative sample of adults in Montana, were used to assess attitudes toward a primary seat belt law. Results Sixty-one percent of respondents supported a primary seat belt law. Using multiple logistic regression analyses, women (AOR 1.87; 95% CI 1.49-2.36), persons aged 65 years and older (1.45; 1.06-1.96), American Indians (2.71; 1.55-4.75), those with health insurance (1.51; 1.07-2.14), and those who reported always wearing their seat belt (4.05; 3.14-5.21) were more likely to support a primary seat belt law than respondents without these characteristics. Conclusions The majority of adults in a rural state support a primary seat belt law.

Legislative Voting Behavior, Seen and Unseen: A Theory of Roll‐Call Vote Selection

The empirical study of legislative behavior largely relies on roll‐call vote analysis, but roll‐call votes in many legislatures represent only a sample of legislative votes. We have good reasons to believe this sample is particularly poor for inferring party effects on legislative behavior. The selection of votes for roll call may be endogenous to exactly the characteristics of voting behavior (for instance, party cohesion) that we want to study. We must understand the roll‐call vote institution and account for its selection effects before we can draw inferences about legislative behavior from roll‐call results. This article develops a game‐theoretic model of roll‐call vote requests predicated on party leaders requesting votes to enforce party discipline. The model offers general and testable predictions about the selection process and how it affects observed and unobserved legislative voting behavior, particularly party cohesion.

Uncovering Political Influence by Using Network Analyses and Exploring Contribution/Party Interactions: The Case of Ohio Legislative Voting

Legislative roll call voting is a decisive moment in the exercise of democratic power, and understanding how campaign contributions affect roll call voting speaks directly to timely issues of influence and corruption. Methodological limitations on the question of how contributions affect voting produces mixed findings. Using original data on the Ohio Legislature, I perform uniquely sociological (network) analyses to help overcome the limitations of prior research and bring the literature closer to an answer on how contributions affect voting. Results show that campaign contributions significantly affect voting, in the context of party. The results imply a causal relationship whereby contributions affect votes. I discuss the implications of these findings for policy research and political power work.

Sex and the Statehouse: The Effects of Gender on Legislative Roll‐Call Voting*

Objective. This analysis examines whether differences exist between women and men state legislators in their roll‐call voting behavior involving matters of economic and regulatory policy.Methods. Using interest group rating scores, I examine the voting behavior of representatives in the lower houses of 28 states in legislative sessions from 1995 to 2000. By controlling for a host of variables related to legislators (political party, years of service, etc.) and their districts (average income, level of education, urbanization, etc.), I am able to isolate the independent effect of gender on roll‐call voting.Results. The findings demonstrate that among Democratic legislators women are less conservative than men, but among Republican lawmakers women are slightly more conservative than men. Additional analyses show that many factors that influence legislative voting by women and men are similar; however, political party has a more prominent effect among women.Conclusion. Although factors such as political party and some constituency characteristics exert a much stronger influence than gender, women and men legislators differ in their roll‐call voting even when controls for a wide assortment of individual‐ and district‐level conditions are taken into account.

Dealing in Discipline: Party Switching and Legislative Voting in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000

Compared to U.S. political parties, parties in Italy (and Europe generally) are quite cohesive. Rarely do members of parliament vote against their copartisans in legislative divisions. Yet in Italy in recent years, legislators switch parties with seeming abandon. Between 1996 and spring 2000, one out of four deputies in the Chamber of Deputies switched parties at least once, compared to only 20 switches in the U.S. Congress from 1947 to 1997 (Nokken 2000). We examine the relationship between switching and observed party unity in Italy by focusing on individual legislators' switching decisions and voting behavior. Overall, switchers move out of highly disciplined parties, suggesting that they switch partly in order to escape strong discipline.

Mandates, Parties and Dissent

Russia's mixed electoral system offers an excellent opportunity to study the effects of electoral rules on party discipline in legislative voting. Under the rules in force from the 1993 to 2003 elections, one half of the Russian Duma's members were elected on party lists, while the remaining half were elected by plurality vote in single-member districts (SMDs). The existing literature has found inconclusive evidence for the direction and magnitude of the effect of such mandate-type differences on the level of party discipline in floor voting. Using a comprehensive database of electronically recorded votes in the Duma in the period between 1994 and 2003 and a panel data structure, we examine the influence of this hybrid system on factional voting cohesion for votes on budget bills. The panel structure permits a more sensitive and rigorous research design than has been employed in previous research. We find modest evidence that SMD representatives defect from the faction position on budget bills more often than proportional representation representatives, even taking into account such intervening factors as party faction, ideology, committee membership and the evolution of the post-communist political system.

Invisible Politics: Institutional Incentives and Legislative Alignments in the Russian Duma, 1996–99

Previous analysis of legislative voting has focused on the behavior of nominal legislative parties, regardless of whether the country under examination was an established democracy or a newly democratized country. This approach is inadequate for countries with young party systems. To establish the extent to which legislative coalitions are party based, scholars must allow for the possibility that institutional incentives predominate over party influence. For this study, I applied a Bayesian discrete latent variable method to identify the legislative coalitions in the 1996‐99 Duma. I found that legislative alignments cut across party lines: electoral incentives and support for the president contribute to divides within parties that lack coherent platforms. Here I present a novel methodological approach to the identification of intraparty divisions and the major determinants of legislative coalitions in many legislative settings. This approach allows a comparison of the importance of party influence relative to other institutional incentives. It is especially useful for analyzing legislative voting in young party systems and where constitutional frameworks and electoral systems subject legislators to competing pressures.

Constituents’ economic interests and senator support for spending limitations

Peltzman [Peltzman, S., 1984. Constituent interest and congressional voting. Journal of Law and Economics 27, 181–210] argues that if constituents’ economic interests have well-defined “winners and losers” and are appropriately measured, then constituents’ economic interests, and not legislator ideology, are the most important determinates of legislator voting. We test Peltzman's theory by examining senatorial voting on three mandated spending limitation bills. We find, consistent with Peltzman's theory, that the ratio of federal spending in a senator's state to federal taxes paid by that state, and not a senator's personal ideology, matters on legislation where there are well-defined economic “winners and losers.” This is particularly important because unlike other constituents’ economic interest measures that only impact a fraction of the constituency, the ratio of federal spending to federal taxes in a state represents the economic interests of all the constituents in a state.

Religious Identification and Legislative Voting

While religion has profound effects on political behavior in mass publics, less is known about the effect of religion on political elites. This article considers the extent to which religious identification influences the roll-call voting behavior of Mormon members of the U.S. House of Representatives. While some aspects of Mormonism make it seem like a likely case for religious influence, the literature on legislative decision making provides no theoretical rationale for religious influence on legislative roll-call voting. A simple empirical test finds that Mormon representatives are no more unified in their voting behavior than are randomly selected sets of legislators.

Mr. Smith and the economy: the influence of economic conditions on individual legislator voting

This paper estimates the influence of macroeconomic conditions on individual legislator voting over time. Previous work shows legislator voting to be stable over careers. In this paper, voting on an ideological issue space (ADA scores) and a fiscal issue space (NTU scores), from 1976 to 2002, exhibits significant short-term cyclicality with economic conditions. Individual legislators polarize by party in response to rising unemployment, and converge in response to rising inflation. As legislators accumulate tenure, they become more ideologically conservative but more fiscally liberal. Results are also reported on presidential party, divided government, and region. All results are weaker in the Senate than in the House.

Commentary on Welch's Early and Important Work Separating Out the Effects of Constituency and Campaign Contributions on Congressional Roll-Call Votes

Writing mote than 20 years ago, W. P. Welch used a probit model to attempt to isolate the effect of campaign contributions on roll-call from other influences like the legislator's constituency, party, and ideology. The literature on the relationship between campaign contributions and legislative votes is extensive, with often-inconsistent findings. It is typically the case contributions from interested groups are correlated with roll-call favorable to the contributor's interests. Studies include a wider range of variables find this relationship is so simple. Interest groups contribute to members who are already often predisposed to support their position. If the group has a local presence, then members may be with the group because of constituency pressures. Party and ideology also must be factored into the analysis (Ansolabehere, Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003; Chin 2005; Roscoe and Jenkins 2005; Wawro 2001). Welch's (1982) article presents a conceptual framework in which to consider the of campaign contributions from an interested group votes by legislators on past or future legislation. Welch links this transaction to what he labels exchange theory. His framework includes assumptions were well grounded in the understanding of congressional elections and campaign finance at the time. His overall conclusion was although contributions are significant, they were the least important determinant of legislative voting (Welch 1982, 493). What other determinants were more important? He finds variables like dairy production (a measure of constituency interest), ideology, and party are all stronger predictors of the vote on milk price supports than campaign contributions. Welch's article is cited in sociology, economics, and political science journals. While this essay will explain its central argument about the relative influence of campaign contributions on roll-call votes and vice versa, it is also the case Welch is frequently cited in studies of legislative behavior, interest groups (especially agricultural groups), and, more broadly, about campaign finance. Context of Welch's Article The conventional wisdom that interest groups 'buy' influence by contributing to political motivates Welch's analysis (Welch 1982,487). At the time of publication, the issue of campaign contributions from interest groups had become more salient because of the Watergate investigation of a botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. The investigation had uncovered large illegal contributions to the Committee to Reelect the President (CREP) during the 1972 election cycle (Corrado and Mann et al. 1997,283). Watergate galvanized Congress to reform the way federal elections are financed. New regulations in the form of a set of 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) imposed contribution and spending limitations, mandated disclosure, and established an enforcement agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to over see the new regulations. Welch indirectly mentions FECA in his opening paragraph when he states the public belief interest groups buy influence is a reason for Congress either publicly to finance congressional campaigns or to place a limit on the amount of monies a candidate may receive from political action committees (Welch 1982, 178). While Welch finds only modest independent effects campaign contributions, in his words not a major influence, he does find those who received contributions in the 1974 election cycle were more likely to vote higher milk-price supports in 1975. Similarly, those who voted with the milk producers in 1975 were more likely to receive contributions from the Dairy PAC during the 1976 election cycle. Consistent with what we know about legislative specialization and interest-group behavior, he finds contributions to the Agriculture Committee members were higher, other things being equal. …

Effort, Intensity and Position Taking

Effort is a crucial element of the legislative process — writing bills, forming coalitions, crafting strategies, and debating. We develop a model in which legislative decisions are the product of competitive effort by two teams, one trying to pass new legislation, and the other to block it. Teams choose effort levels based on preferences over the policy outcome, political rewards for effort, and opportunity costs, and the team that produces more effort wins. We apply this model to four cases of major legislation from the pre-cloture Senate: passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Ship Purchase Act of 1915, the Ship Arming bill of 1917, and the adoption of the Senate cloture rule in 1917. These cases demonstrate the value of looking beyond legislative voting and the rules that structure it, and of including effort as a key element of the legislative game.

Trading Policy: Constituents and Political Party in U.S. Trade Policy

Scholars have argued that constituent interests and political parties affect voting on trade policy legislation in the U.S. Congress. The existing empirical research on trade policy voting, however, has not utilized research designs that allow us to disentangle how constituents and parties affect legislative voting. In this paper we apply one-to-one matching research designs to compare the effects of constituency and party on trade policy voting in both the U.S. House and Senate. The research design allows us to account for a variety of different constituent factors that could influence voting, and then determine if party has any effect beyond constituent interests. The results suggest that party plays a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy once we account for constituency effects. Between 1824 and 1930, political party almost completely determines trade policy votes and although the effect of party is weaker since 1930 it is still significant. These results suggest that to understand the political economy of trade policy we need to incorporate the way that partisan politics affects trade policy.

Strategic Party Government: Party Influence in Congress, 1789–2000

Why does the influence of Congressional parties fluctuate over time? Building on prevailing answers, we develop a model, Strategic Party Government, which highlights the electoral motives of legislative parties and the strategic interaction between parties. We test this theory using the entire range of House and Senate party behavior from 1789 to 2000 and find that the strategic behavior of parties complements members' preferences as an explanation for variation in party influence. Specifically, the strongest predictors of one party's voting unity are the unity of the opposing party and the difference between the parties in the preceding year. Moreover, we find strong links between party behavior in Congress and electoral outcomes: an increase in partisan influence on legislative voting has adverse electoral costs, while winning contested votes has electoral benefits.

A Delayed Return to Historical Norms: Congressional Party Polarization after the Second World War

Although a rich body of research has explored the sources of party polarization in the US House of Representatives, it has focused primarily on the House since the late 1970s. Drawing on a dataset of historical election outcomes, legislative voting and survey data, this article takes an alternative approach that examines both the US Senate and the House in their broader historical contexts. It is argued that the unusually bipartisan era of the 1950s created a set of circumstances that enabled congressional parties to remain relatively unpolarized throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Although the national parties became more ideologically distinct in the mid-1960s, congressional parties lagged behind. As a result, a group of moderate legislators emerged who were cross-pressured between their national parties and their constituencies. Only when natural patterns of electoral loss and retirement replaced these legislators did congressional party polarization re-emerge.

The Confederate Flag: Southern Heritage or Racial Bias?

Drawing on a unique data set that matches legislative votes on the Confederate flag to electoral support for an law, I find evidence that legislators with anti-miscegenation constituents are the flag's most likely supporters. To the extent that opposing the right to marry across races reveals a preference for discrimination, support for the flag appears to have lacked motivation from an unbiased Southern heritage.

Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross‐voting.