Legislative Voting Research Articles

Legislative Voting and the Economic Theory of Politics

Empirical studies of legislative voting have multiplied since the mid-1970s. Early work [13] distinguished two modes of representation: Delegates, who vote as voters want, and Trustees, who use their own judgment. More recently, researchers have considered only delegates, claiming that legislators who use their own are shirking. Following principal-agent theory, representatives are conceived as conduits through which citizens transmit and express interests. Empirical work on this question, however, has found that the legislator's ideology explains more variation in vote choices than is explained by measures of constituent interest. The seeming contradiction has led some [9; 10; 17] to reject the economic of legislator behavior as erroneous. The truth is that no such theory has ever been fairly stated, much less tested. Estimating equations have been ad hoc, and the usual approach to measuring has imposed correlation between the equation error and an explanatory variable [8]. In both cases, the result is

Electoral Support and the Capture of Legislators: Evidence from North Carolina's Vote on Radioactive Waste Disposal

Empirical tests of Stigler's (1971) theory of economic regulation using roll-call voting of legislators have ignored Stigler's hypothesis that secure legislators behave differently from insecure legislators. In this study of legislator voting on the Southeast Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Compact in North Carolina, the extent to which legislators' votes represent the economic interests of their geographic constituencies is significantly influenced by the support they expect to receive in reelection campaigns. Moreover, there is weak evidence in favor of Stigler's supposition that more secure legislators are more likely to vote the general interest than are their less secure colleagues.

Campaign Contributions and Legislative Voting in the California Assembly

In this article the authors test for the influence of campaign contributions from economic interest groups on legislative voting in the California Assembly. California does not restrict the size of contributions that special interests may provide to candidates for state office. Consequently, if the purpose of campaign contributions is to secure favorable voting on legislation, this should be evident in an unregulated setting. However, for both business and labor interests, neither the number nor the monetary amount of campaign contributions to incumbents are found to have a major influence on legislative roll call voting.

Foreign Policy in a Presidential Democracy

In view of the very different kinds of democracy, very different levels of presidential authority, and very different kinds of foreign policy decision making in this world, it would be presumptuous to attempt to generalize about foreign policy making in any and all presidential democracies. Instead I am speaking here exclusively about making foreign policy in America's presidential democracy. Presidential and parliamentary democracies - which work best? To me the parliamentary system appears to work best in smaller, less diverse countries than the United States - countries where both the public and the politicians are familiar with the history and practice of parliamentary rule, where the states are creatures of the national government, where centralized national parties can discipline errant legislators, and where senior civil servants can largely govern the ministries. None of these conditions is likely to prevail in the United States. I have that the power to bring the executive branch down with a legislative vote of no confidence would produce anything but utter confusion in this country. I have question that requiring the president to appear before a televised session of the House for questioning on, for example, his tax proposal would be far less valuable than the Ways and Means Committee grilling the secretary

Linking Constituency Interests to Legislative Voting Behaviour: The Role of District Economic and Electoral Composition in the Repeal of the Corn Laws*

Linking Constituency Interests to Legislative Voting Behaviour: The Role of District Economic and Electoral Composition in the Repeal of the Corn Laws*

State legislative voting patterns on abortion restrictions in Louisiana

The Louisiana state legislature passed the nation's most restrictive anti-abortion law in 1991. Policy dimension theory suggests that legislative voting on noneconomic social issues such as abortion policy often reflects the interest group and grassroots pressures from the constituency. Probit analysis results indicate that legislators who voted against the anti-abortion legislation aremuch more likely to represent large-city districts than rural, small-town, or suburban districts. The primacy of the urban-nonurban distinction is further explained by religious, racial, and gender factors, as well as legislators' general social policy positions.

Congressional responsiveness to presidential popularity: The electoral context

A number of recent studies have reported that the influence of the president's public approval rating on congressional support is not substantial. We hypothesize that this unexpected finding might be the result of the inappropriate application of an approval-driven model of legislative voting to the entire Congress. Specifically, we argue that members from certain kinds of electoral contexts—constituencies where the president's, or their own, electoral standing is in doubt—should be especially likely to vary their support for the president with changes in his approval rating. Although the patterns of presidential support scores between 1977 and 1991 do not confirm our specific hypotheses, they do suggest that the electoral context from which a legislator emerges does shape his or her responsiveness to changes in national presidential approval.

Ideology, Interest Group Scores, and Legislative Votes

This article reviews writings by economists and political scientists on the importance of ideology in governmental decision making. We consider various problems in this research, discuss several shortcomings in these recent studies in the context of the larger literature on legislative behavior, and demonstrate the statistical inconsistency of the commonly used methodologies based on interest group scores.

Competitive lobbying for a legislator's vote

This paper develops a model of interest group lobbying based on the central premise that such lobbying is fundamentally an exercise in strategic information transmission. Lobbyists typically possess information that legislators do not and, inter alia, such information is relevant to legislators when it concerns the consequences — either policy or political — of supporting one bill rather than another. However, given that the interests of lobbyists do not necessarily coincide with those of legislators, the extent to which a lobbyist is able to persuade a legislator to act in his or her interest is moot. The paper explores the extent to which lobbyists can influence a legislative decision in such a setting; in particular, we are concerned with the incentives for interest groups to acquire costly information and lobby a legislator when there exist other groups that do not share the same interests. Among the results are that a legislator will on average make “better” decisions with lobbying than without, and that the more important is an issue to a special interest group, the more likely is the legislator to make the correct full-information decision.

Sectionalism and American Foreign Policy: The Political Geography of Consensus and Conflict

For over two decades American foreign policy has been the subject of protracted conflict. Deep divisions exist over the uses of American power. This study argues that this conflict is regional in nature and is part of a larger struggle over national priorities between the nation's oldest and newest industrializing regions. Using Congress as a proxy for the national polity, I employ a spatial model to describe and analyze the regional bases of legislative voting over foreign policy. I show that since the late 1960s conflicts over foreign policy matters have pitted the “manufacturing belt” against the “sunbelt.” I argue that this regional conflict goes a long way in explaining the difficulty America's political leaders have experienced in articulating a vision of the national interest that inspires broad domestic support.

Explaining the Vote: Constituency Constrains on Sophisticated Voting

It is well documented that legislators' voting decisions are affected by the need to justify these decisions to home constituents. However, exactly how this need influences legislative decision making is as yet unclear. In this paper, a model of legislative vote and explanation is developed to explore the issue. All agents in the model are presumed to be purely policy outcome-oriented, so legislators seek reelection to pursue policy outcomes. The district and the legislator have different information regarding the legislator's preferences, however, and it is this feature that drives the analysis. The principal finding is that the need to explain votes improves the district's payoffs relative to the case of no explanation. This occurs in two ways, depending on the penalties for legislators being discovered not to have told the truth when justifying their legislative behavior to constituents. When the penalty is low, legislators whose preferences exactly reflect those of (the majority of) their constituents vote sincerely more often than otherwise to signal their preferences to the district. And when the penalty is sufficiently severe, such legislators vote sophisticatedly all the time and are capable of fully justifying any decision to constituents after the fact.

Environmental Political Culture and Environmental Political Development: An Analysis of Legislative Voting, 1971–1989

On a number of recent occasions I have argued that affairs since World War II arose from widespread changes in values associated with the evolution of the American society and economy. The change was slow and persistent, demographic in character, as people became more educated and more affluent. Older types of production and consumption gave way to newer and among the newer was environmental quality, a new component in the persistent desire for a higher standard of living. Such new values were held more strongly among younger people and became diffused throughout society more fully with each new generation.1 Much of that argument rested on qualitative evidence, drawn from the publications of organizations, new developments in science, public policy at state and federal levels, the debates in legislative bodies, regulatory agencies and executive offices, and the contests implicit in litigation. At the same time, some of it was quantitative, especially that provided by

Freedom and Federalism: The First Amendment's Protection of Legislative Voting

The ideal of popular sovereignty inspired the creation of the American Republic.2 In an ideal republican government, elected representatives express and implement the people's will through legislative speech and activities. However, an elected legislator's ability to perform these representative functions depends largely upon her ability to speak freely and to make independent choices. In short, republican government requires legislative independence.3 It follows that constraints on independent legislative speech or voting undermine the legislature's representative function. As an institutional approximation of the republican ideal, the American constitutional system depends upon legislative independence for sustenance and legitimacy. American legislatures, the political institutions most responsive to the public due to regular and frequent elections, supposedly infuse the people's will into the machinery of government. As institutions designed to facilitate decision through debate, legislatures channel rich public debate into effective democratic self-government. As a result, more than any other institution of republican government, legislatures thrive when debate inside their walls is

Issue avoidance: Evidence from the U.S. senate

This research considers whether there is evidence of legislators' issue avoidance, or unwillingness to reveal one's position. It links, for the first time, two important areas of inquiry: legislative decision making and issue avoidance. The data describe senatorial behavior over eighteen years, involving approximately 200,000 individual voting decisions. During that time, senators were polled by CQ after each missed roll call, and asked to indicate their positions. Issue avoidance is a subset of the nonresponses to that poll. A conceptual model of voting and position taking is presented, incorporating both behaviors and intentions. It defines two kinds of issue avoidance: “proactive,” deliberate avoidance at the time of the roll call, and “reactive,” avoidance decided on after votes missed inadvertently. Application of the model permits inferences about intent. Proactive avoidance accounts for 12% of nonvoting during the terms' first five years. It also represents 40% of failures to reveal positions. As much as another 19% of nonvoting results in reactive avoidance. A sixth-year increase in issue avoidance is indicated, although not conclusively. The findings strongly suggest that models of legislative voting should be amended to account for both proactive and reactive avoidance.

A spatial model of legislative voting with perceptual error

This paper presents a unidimensional spatial model of voting in which members of Congress vote based on an imprecise perception of roll-call alternatives. The model is applied to the Senate roll-call votes of 1977 to estimate the ideal points of the senators, and to examine the role of a liberal-conservative dimension in describing votes on economic issues relative to social issues. In light of the spatial model, the paper argues that “standard” models of roll-call voting are not based on a theory of choice, and hence, that it is difficult to interpret their results. Alternatives to standard models, based on the spatial model, are developed and are used to analyze the role of ideology in deciding a specific economic issue: coal strip-mining.

Shirking, representation, and Congressional behavior: Voting on the 1983 amendments to the Social Security Act

Our central goals at the outset of the paper were three: (1) to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable, ADA score, that purports to measure the personal ideology of the candidate; (2) demonstrate that the constituent economic interest variable should be adjusted to account for the fact thatvoters, not citizens, are the only effective principals in influencing a legislator's voting activities; and (3) call into question, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, the claim that legislators shirk their responsibilities to voters by voting their own ideological preferences. In order to evaluate our efforts, consider Table 5. For a large majority (15) of the 18 relevant runs, the ideological variable is significant. Our measure of constituent economic interests does not eliminate the explanatory power of the ideological voting variable, but this does not indicate shirking. As opposed to shirking, we may observe ideological voting because (1) it provides brand name capital, (2) it represents the ideological preferences of the constituents, or (3) it acts as a measure of median voter economic preferences. Further, ADA scores do not allow us to differentiate between these competing explanations. For 11 of the 18 models one of the economic variables accounts for a significant portion of the variance in the dependent variables. The results derived from our measure of constituent economic interests contradict most findings of the LASI school and raise questions about the validity of the empirical characterization of constituent interests in that research. A breakdown of the results by chamber indicates that significant differences in the degree of ideological voting between the House and Senate may exist. This is important in that most research has focused only on the Senate where ideological voting is more prevalent. For the House, Table 5 reveals the constituent economic interest variable isalways significant, and in fully one-half of the relevant regressions it is theonly significant variable, knocking ADA out of the race. As noted earlier, the insignificance of ADA is some indication of the absence of ideological shirking though its significance may indicate only measurement error, voter ideology, or reputational capital. In the Senate, the results are more evenly split, though it is clear that the adjusted (for reelection constituency) economic interest variable is an improvement. ADA is significant in all 12 Senate regressions, and the respective economic variables are significant in 5, or just under half. This side-by-side comparison is provocative, though it remains to be tested in detail. But our preliminary conclusions can be stated as follows. First, as Peltzman (1984) suggested, a better specification of economic interest and constituency representation reduces, though it does not eliminate, the role of the ADA variable in the Senate. Second, we find evidence that ideological shirking, if it exists, is much smaller in the House. In fact, from an institutional perspective, it can be argued that economic interests are dominant, since House districts are smaller and more homogeneous. Further, the shorter terms for House members may make them more directly accountable to voters, and smaller groups of voters may force a lesser reliance on pure ideological campaigning and require a more personal presentation of self.

Congressional Voting in the 1920s: A Test of Urban-Rural Conflict

In the 1950s, historians explained many phenomena of the 1920s as products of conflicts between urban and rural areas. The Ku Klux Klan, Fundamentalism, Prohibition, immigration restriction, and Al Smith's defeat in the presidential election of 1928 were understood as examples of urban-rural tensions. More recent scholars have found evidence to challenge the urban-rural thesis by examining election results, state legislative voting, Klan membership, and support for Prohibition and Fundamentalism.1 Before scholars reject the urban-rural interpretation, however, it can be tested in a new way: analysis of roll-call voting in the House of Representatives in the 1920s. Such an analysis assumes that the intrinsic and symbolic importance of certain issues to urban or rural legislators outweighs other factors (friendship, partisanship, and pressures from House leaders, the president, and special interests) in determining voting patterns. For a more precise refinement of the urban and rural classifications, congressional voting of representatives from metropolitan districts and extremely rural ones will be compared. The urban-rural (and metro-most rural) divisions cannot be perfect and complete, but differences in voting should be observable if the urban-rural thesis is valid. Not all issues of the 1920s can be examined through roll calls; many did not come before Congress for a vote. On two questions central to the urban-rural interpretation, howeverProhibition and immigration restriction Congress did act. Four votes on each will be considered. Two roll-call votes on immigration restriction involved voting first to approve an amendment to a bill to reduce the suspension of all immigration from two years to just fourteen months, and second, to pass the bill. Four years later the House accepted an amendment to another bill to limit the burden of proof required of aliens to stay in the country, and then it approved the bill itself that restricted immigration to 2 percent of the 1890 population. In both 1920 and 1924, opponents of immigration restriction would have supported

Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, A Southern Slaveholder (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Secret and Sacred: The Diaries ofJames Henry Hammond, A Southern Slaveholder. Edited by Carol Bleser, foreword by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xxix, 342. $22.95.) "I write these pages to vent my feelings," confessed James Henry Hammond (p. 106). Hammond, whom Drew Faust and Carol Bleser in an earlier study have so handsomely and insightfully portrayed, had need for such an outlet. He suffered from lifelong, chronic depression, perhaps partially genetic in character but mostly environmental. His father Elisha, a New England-bred South Carolina schoolteacher, failed financially time and again, but through his son he sought to achieve what always had eluded him: a secure place in the state's rigid hierarchy. As a result, his eldest son James Henry early felt unrelenting pressure to achieve perfection in all his endeavors. Provided with a gifted mind, a handsome physique, and a social bearing that met all the criteria ofthat gregarious, formal culture, the young Hammond seemed destined for great things. But the roguish Elisha never praised his achievements; he only whined, wheedled, and found fault. In reaction, Hammond periodically "would self-destruct, either through illness or flagrantly foolish sexual misadventures," Louis Rubin observes in his thoughtful foreword (xvii). For instance, as early as his college days at South Carolina College, where he was a prizewinning student, he may have sexually assaulted Thomas Jefferson Withers, his sleeping roommate. Faust in her biography and Bleser in her thoughtful and convincing introduction here, both deny the possibility. On the other hand, Martin Duberman has erroneously transformed the incident into a gay-rights polemic. From reading the correspondence, I believe that something took place because men do not refer to a roommate's attempt at intercourse even injest and yet remain good friends as this pair did. Most likely, the affair resembled a prison-style encounter between two physically unequal partners, one ofwhom, Hammond, translated his compulsion for oedipal power into sexual aggression. Certainly Hammond's treatment of women was suspiciously hostile: to him they were usable commodities and little else, as his actions, diary, and letters of advice to male relations bluntly attest. BOOK REVIEWS261 In any event, Hammond paired his extravagant ambitions for wealth, intellectual fame, and political power with a self-defeating desire for degradation and exposure. Although different in so many ways in character, Hammond shared with former President Richard Nixon a strange desire to leave for posterity his most secret thoughts, opinions, and passions—a record that anyone else would have made sure never gained public exposure. The document itself is a masterpiece in unconscious self-revelation. Begun in 1 84 1 and ended in 1 864, shortly before his death at the relatively young age of fifty-seven, Hammond's diaries are a rich source of social, political, and psychological insight with regard to Hammond himself, Carolina society , and the planter class as a whole. Prior to his first diary entry, Hammond had begun a successful lawpractice in Columbia; obliged well placed Nullifying patrons like Francis Pickens; married Catherine Fitzsimons, a quiet, homely heiress who belonged to the powerful Hampton clan that vainly opposed their union; and served briefly in Congress before psychosomatic illness temporarily blunted his ambitions. The journal chronicles his maneuvering to obtain the governor's chair, a gift of annual legislative vote that made it more honorific than substantial. Like other planters, Hammond loved titles like governor, senator, or general, as they signified status, popularity, dignity. For instance, he sought a militia post in part because he was "very sick" of his present rank "and altho' militia titles are of no consequence, since they will stick to us, we had as well have the highest" (p. 30). Having eventually won the governorship, however, he then proceeded not only to ruin himself but also his three nieces, daughters ofWade Hampton, byengaging them in sexual play. Rumors circulated; the nieces were doomed to spinsterhood in that shame-conscious society. Forced by Hampton's outrage into political exile, Hammond sought emotional release by plunging into harsh slave management to resurrect his properties; by writing diaries, proslavery pieces, and letters to intellectual friends; and by losing himself in the...

Party-Based Voting in a Southern State Legislature

This article uses established measures of party difference and party cohesion to analyze the effects of emerging two-party competition in contested roll call votes in the South Carolina House of Representatives, 1977-1987. The analysis also treats legislative voting in the state with respect to the party affiliation of governors. The results reveal little convincing evidence of party as a major reference source for legislative roll call behavior in South Carolina. Even though there are some examples of stronger party-based voting, they appear to occur in a random fashion rather than on the basis of a major, organized attempt by legislators to vote along party lines. The findings suggest that further research is needed to explore the cues for legislative party voting in South Carolina and to identify influences with which to compare state legislative voting experiences, particularly in the other southern states.

The Rationality of Ideology

SEVERAL recent empirical studies of legislative voting conclude that forces other than the objectively identifiable self-interest of voters in a district influence a representative's voting behavior.1 Each of these studies finds that the explanatory power of a regression of congressional votes on constituent characteristics is improved by including a separate measure of the ideology of the representative in question. The authors of these studies differ, however, with regard to what their respective measures of ideology represent. Kau and Rubin view politicians as accurate representatives of the ideological views of their constituents.2 Kalt and Zupan acknowledge the possibility that ideological voting by representatives reflects the ideology of their constituents. They also accept Downs's3 point that ideology may be an efficient way for politicians to summarize their positions on the issues. They claim, how-