Legislative Preferences Research Articles

Factors Influencing Georgia Legislators' Decision-Making on Nurse Practitioner Scope of Practice.

The state of Georgia faces challenges in providing access to care, largely due to rural hospital closures and physician shortages. Although nurse practitioners (NPs) could help address Georgia's urgent health care needs, the state remains restrictive with respect to NP scope of practice (SOP). This study examined factors that influence Georgia legislators' decision-making on NP SOP. In June 2016, after the January through March legislative session, a questionnaire was e-mailed to 49 state legislators on the Committees on Health and Human Services in Georgia's House of Representatives and Senate. The questionnaire was adapted from a legislative questionnaire previously used in research on state educational policy. Nine of 49 (18%) Georgia legislators responded. The majority of nine respondents were Republicans having served less than 15 years in the legislature. The number of respondents was approximately equal between Senate and House of Representatives. The respondents rated expert testimony and hearing from constituents as most likely to influence their decision-making on NP SOP. They reported that media and concerns about reelection were least likely to influence their decision-making about NP SOP. Therefore, nurses who aim to influence state policy should consider legislator preferences, such as speaking personally with constituents and receiving expert testimony. In-person communication could enhance interactions with legislators, potentially improving policy outcomes. Future research is necessary and should be conducted by NPs to determine the forms of communication and content in testimony most effective in influencing state lawmakers about NP SOP and examine if results vary by state political or other contexts.

Legislators' Sources of Behavioral Health Research and Preferences for Dissemination: Variations by Political Party.

This study sought to characterize primary sources of behavioral health research and dissemination preferences of state legislators and assess differences by political party. A 2017 cross-sectional survey of state legislators (N=475) assessed where legislators seek, and the most important features of, behavioral health research. Bivariate analyses and multivariate logistic regression were conducted. Advocacy organizations (53%), legislative staff (51%), and state agencies (48%) were identified most frequently as sources of behavioral health research. Universities were identified by significantly more Democrats than Republicans (34% versus 19%; adjusted odds ratio=1.79). Data about budget impact and cost-effectiveness were most frequently rated as very important, but by significantly fewer Democrats than Republicans (77% versus 87% and 76% versus 89%, respectively). To reach legislators and satisfy their information preferences, behavioral health researchers should target diverse audiences, partner with intermediary organizations, and craft messages that include economic evaluation data.

Pivotal Politics, Partisan Polarization, and Policy Predictability

Traditional political economy models such as those founded on the work of Duncan Black and Anthony Downs cannot capture certain important features of the dynamics of policy outcomes in the United States. Because these models assume that policy change is directly responsive to the median voter, they cannot address questions about policy gridlock and drift. Because the Black-Downs model assumes that only the median matters, it assumes away other changes to the distribution of preferences of voters and legislators. In particular, it cannot address the potential consequences of polarization for policy outcomes, gridlock, or uncertainty. I argue that the pivotal politics framework of Keith Krehbiel may be quite useful in understanding the relationship between political polarization and policy uncertainty in addition to its traditional application to the study of gridlock.

Changes in Latitudes, Differences in Attitudes: Assessing the Distinctiveness of Southern State Legislators

A variety of studies have examined the manner in which motivation effects the decisions made, and the activities engaged in, by politicians. However, one area that seems to have been ignored has been whether there are regional differences among state legislators as it relates to ambition and what, if any, effect it has on the preferences of Southern and non-Southern legislators. Utilizing data from a survey administered to state legislators from all 50 states, we are able to demonstrate that legislators from Southern states exhibit significantly higher levels of progressive ambition than those from non-Southern states, and that this increased level of ambition exerts a significant impact on the types of activities Southern legislators would prefer to spend their time engaging in.

Constructing and Repairing Our Bridges: Statistical Considerations When Placing Agents into Legislative Preference Space

A statistical test of hypotheses regarding the strategic interaction between legislators and third-party agents, such as lobbyists, bureaucrats, or experts, requires some ``bridging'' method to place each type of actor into preference spaces that are comparable. Current solutions to the bridging problem either attempt to place both legislators and agents into an arbitrary preference space entirely disconnected from the institutional setting, or they attempt to place agents into a legislative roll-call preference space mistakenly as if agents were themselves legislators. I propose a new method that leverages the observed behavioral hypotheses to identify a set of agent-specific bridging parameters that place agents directly into legislative roll-call preference space as agents, rather than counterfactually as legislators. I apply my method to test whether members of Congress condition their questioning of witnesses in committee hearings on preference similarity within the legislator-witness dyad, as a test of lobbying models for strategic information transmission.

Ideology and Extremism of Interest Groups: Evidence from Lobbyist Declarations in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin

What are the ideological positions of private interests? Valid measurements of interest group and legislator preferences on the same scale enable a closer examination of the role of private interests in the legislative process. In this paper, I exploit lobbying disclosure requirements in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin to provide a new measure of interest group ideology. These states' legislatures either permit or require lobbyists to declare their principals' positions on lobbied bills. I combine these data with roll call votes and candidate survey responses to estimate, via an item-response model, the ideal points of legislators and interest groups in the same space. Although the interest groups' position-based ideal points correlate strongly with contribution-based measures, there is more extremism in the former, which is primarily driven by conservative-leaning groups. In addition to providing a new measure of interest group ideology, the analysis suggests that private interests, including corporations and trade groups, cannot be ruled out as a source of partisan polarization.

Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: A case study on the 107th U.S. Senate

Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators’ preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are affected by outside forces such as party pressure, minority status or procedural rules. This paper describes a Bayesian hierarchical model that extends existing spatial voting models to test sharp hypotheses about differences in preferences using posterior probabilities associated with such hypotheses. We use our model to investigate the effect of the change of party majority status during the 107th U.S. Senate on the revealed preferences of senators. This analysis provides evidence that change in party affiliation might affect the revealed preferences of legislators, but provides no evidence about the effect of majority status on the revealed preferences of legislators.

A study to identify the stock market participation and investment portfolio preferences of legislators

A study to identify the stock market participation and investment portfolio preferences of legislators

A study to identify the stock market participation and investment portfolio preferences of legislators

This study identified the determinants of legislator participation in the stock market and investment portfolio preference. All of the data used for this study were hand collected during 2010-2013 from the property declarations provided by legislators to the Sunshine Acts website of the Control Yuan, Republic of China (Taiwan). Statistical analysis shows that all of the legislators studied have a high education level and relatively uniform above-average assets. The study findings indicate that the stock market participation of legislators is strongly associated with political orientation, higher education level, and higher wealth than median citizens; the two most important factors influencing legislators to participate in the stock market are party and wealth. Furthermore, the wealth and education levels of Kuomintang party legislators are obviously higher than those of legislators of the other parties. The empirical results show that legislators prefer stocks in the electronic and others categories more than those in other categories. This information provides evidence that legislators use their political power in ruling legislative processes to impact the stock price of listed-stock firms, thereby benefitting their investments. In conclusion, this work is focussed on helping voters to understand the implied information behind the ruling effect of legislators.

Congress as manager: oversight hearings and agency morale

AbstractFederal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy. More specifically, we argue that oversight’s effects on agency morale are conditional on whether oversight is adversarial or friendly. We assess our claims using a novel data set of the frequency and tone of hearings in which federal agencies are called to testify before Congress from 1999 to 2011 and merge it with data on agency autonomy and job satisfaction. Our findings suggest that agency morale is sensitive to congressional oversight attention, and thus speak to questions regarding democratic accountability, congressional policymaking and the implementation of public policy.

Quantifying Legislative Uncertainty: A Case Study in Tax Policy

Whether a legislature will or will not enact law is often uncertain. This Article offers an empirical model for quantifying that uncertainty, and it develops this argument in the context of federal income tax rates. Specifically, we estimate a model of legislator preferences on tax rates and show that the political process can be well understood in terms of the preferences of key legislators. We use our statistical model to quantify the uncertainty of tax rates and forecast the direction of likely rate changes in the future. This argument has several implications for policymaking and the analysis of legislative uncertainty more generally. First, quantifying legislative uncertainty offers insight into the behavioral effects of the law. How people respond to the law depends on their perception of the law’s future trajectory. Second, our analysis allows us to explore the stability of major legislative reform. Our methodology allows us to demonstrate that reforms are sometimes predictably unstable. Such reforms can have the perverse result of increasing future legislative uncertainty.

The Precarious Link between Legislators and Constituent Opinion: Evidence from Matched Roll Call and Referendum Votes

This paper tests theories of representation by studying laws that were challenged by referendum. For these laws, we can compare legislator roll call votes and citizen votes on the same law. In a sample of 3,242 roll call votes on 25 laws in nine states, I find that legislators voted congruent with majority opinion in their district 67 percent of the time, so representation generally “worked.” However, when legislator preferences differed from district opinion on an issue, legislators voted congruent with district opinion only 28 percent of the time. Electoral pressure measured by vote margin, proximity of next election, and term limits had at most a modest connection with congruence. The evidence is broadly consistent with the assumption of the citizen-candidate (or trustee) theory that legislators vote their own preferences.

Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Poor Citizens in Switzerland

Over the past decade, a large number of studies have shown that in advanced democracies policymakers are more likely to represent the preferences of high-income citizens than the preferences of low-income citizens. In a quest to understand this income bias in substantive representation, several authors have recently suggested that the persistent descriptive underrepresentation of low-income groups in policymaking institutions may explain why political decisions so frequently are skewed toward the preferences of the affluent. However, although this is a plausible explanation, many previous studies dealing with the consequences of descriptive representation have failed to find an effect of policymakers’ incomes or social class backgrounds on their behavior in office. In this essay, we argue that descriptive representation may indeed have an effect on policymaking, yet for it to be consequential three necessary conditions must be satisfied.

The Influence of Congressional Preferences on Legislative Overrides of Supreme Court Decisions

Studies of Court–Congress relations assume that Congress overrides Court decisions based on legislative preferences, but no empirical evidence supports this claim. Our first goal is to show that Congress is more likely to pass override legislation the further ideologically removed a decision is from pivotal legislative actors. Second, we seek to determine whether Congress rationally anticipates Court rejection of override legislation, avoiding legislation when the current Court is likely to strike it down. Third, most studies argue that Congress only overrides statutory decisions. We contend that Congress has an incentive to override all Court decisions with which it disagrees, regardless of their legal basis. Using data on congressional overrides of Supreme Court decisions between 1946 and 1990, we show that Congress overrides Court decisions with which it ideologically disagrees, is not less likely to override when it anticipates that the Court will reject override legislation, and acts on preferences regardless of the legal basis of a decision. We therefore empirically substantiate a core part of separation-of-powers models of Court–Congress relations, as well as speak to the relative power of Congress and the Court on the ultimate content of policy.

Why do members of congress support agricultural protection?

It seems paradoxical that until recently, developed countries have continued subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors had been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century. What drives support for agricultural protection—the broad array of subsidies to farmers and taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports—in developed countries? We answer this question by testing three competing hypotheses about what drives support for agricultural protection in the US: (i) legislator preferences, (ii) electoral incentives, or (iii) lobbying. Using data on the roll call votes of the members of the 106th through the 110th Congresses (1999–2009) and the scores given to each legislator by the Farm Bureau, our findings suggest that electoral incentives explain a great deal of the variation in support for agricultural protection, but that legislator preferences and lobbying might play a role, too. Moreover, legislator preferences and electoral incentives appear to be substitutes for one another. Why does Congress support agricultural protection? Because many members have electoral incentives to—and because many of those who do not still have other personal or strategic interests at stake.

What’s in a (Party) name? Examining preferences, discipline, and social identity in a parliamentary free vote

In trying to understand the effects of political parties on shaping the voting behaviour of legislators, research has attempted the difficult task of separating the effects of preferences from rules used by party leaders to enforce discipline. However, little research has explored the prospect that party labels also reflect a social identity that is independent of legislators’ preferences and the rules used by party leaders to enforce discipline. In this study we examine that possibility, employing a data set that permits us to control both for leadership-based effects and legislator preferences on a 2000 free vote dealing with stem cell research. Using the British Representation Studies 1997 – which interviewed Members of Parliament regarding their preferences on several key issues related to the bill – we find significant evidence that party-as-identification plays a role in shaping how legislators vote, even after preferences and discipline are accounted for.

제 18대 국회 기명투표 분석: 베이즈(Bayesian) 방법론 적용

본 연구는 국회의 기명투표 분석에 적용될 수 있는 베이즈 방법론을 사용하여 지난 18대 국회에서 처리된 2,389개의 법안에 대한 표결기록을 분석하였다. 기명투표 분석은 의정연구에 관련된 이론적 가설의 실증적 검증을 위한 기초 데이터를 제공하는 경우가 많아 정치학 연구 전반의 발전을 위해 매우 중요한 의미를 가진다. 기명투표 분석에 있어 베이즈 방법론은 기존의 빈도주의적 방법론을 적용할 때 발생할 수 있는 통계적 문제들에 대한 훌륭한 대안을 제시한다. 본 연구에서는 Clinton 등 (2004)가 제안한 베이지언 방법론을 적용, 18대 국회에서 처리된 모든 법안에 대한 표결기록을 분석하여 개별 의원들의 최대선호점(ideal points)과 신뢰구간을 추정했다. 본 연구에서 제안한 방법론의 유용성 을 보여주기 위해 시범적으로 두 가지 경우에 대한 분석을 실시하였다. 하나는 널리 알려진 세 개의 의원 소모임의 최대선호점을 살펴봄으로써 한국 의회 내에 유의미한 표결성향의 스펙트럼이 존재하는지를 살펴보았다. 다른 하나는 제안된 방법론을 활용하여 어떻게 이론적 가설의 검증이 이루어질 수 있는지를 보여주기 위해 18대 국회의 '중간축'과 '몸싸움 방지축'의 위치와 두 중추적 위치에 해당할 가능성이 높은 의원들이 누구인지를 살펴보았다. We apply a Bayesian estimation procedure to the analysis of roll call voting records on 2,389 bills processed during the 18th Korean National Assembly. The analysis of roll calls yields useful tools for to combining the measurement of legislative preference with the models of legislative behavior. The current Bayesian procedure is extremely exible, applicable to any legislative setting, irrespective of the extremism of the legislator's voting history or the number of roll calls available for analysis. It can be applied to any legislative settings, providing a useful solution to many statistical problems inherent in the analysis of roll call voting records. We rst estimate the ideal points of all members of the 18th National Assembly and their condence intervals. Subsequently, using the estimated ideal points, we examine the factional disparity within each major party using the estimated ideal points. Our results clearly suggest that there exists a meaningful ideological spectrum within each party. We also show how the Bayesian procedure can easily be extended to accommodate theoretically interesting theoretical models of legislative behavior. More specically, we demonstrate how the estimated posterior probabilities can be used for identifying pivotal legislators.

Uncertainty and Legislative Coalition Building in Post-Communist Ukraine

Executives vary in their ability to build legislative coalitions to pass their policy agendas. One explanation for the failure of executives to obtain legislative support is their uncertainty over legislator preferences. Using data from the Ukrainian Rada, this article seeks to understand those factors that create this uncertainty. I argue that uncertainty over legislative preferences stems from not only the institutional environment, but also the patterns of partisanship and the extent of legislator cross-pressuring. The empirical results support demonstrate that these factors do matter; however, they do not all matter equally and in ways suggested by the existing literature. By far the most important determinant of legislator predictability is membership in a party allied with the executive.

Labor Shortages, Rural Inequality, and Democratization

A large body of scholarship has asserted that inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets act as a barrier to democratic transitions. This article proposes a theoretical and empirical amendment of this finding, by arguing that employment conditions in the countryside, rather than inequalities in the distribution of fixed assets affected electoral outcomes in societies characterized by high levels of rural inequality. Using empirical evidence from the Prussian districts of Imperial Germany during the period between 1871 and 1912, we show that relative labor market shortages of agricultural workers affected electoral outcomes under conditions of an imperfect protection of electoral secrecy. Shortages of agricultural workers reduced the electoral strength of conservative politicians and increased the willingness of rural voters to “take electoral risks” and vote for the opposition Social Democratic Party. Labor shortages also affect preferences of individual legislators over the reform of electoral institutions. We find that politicians in districts experiencing high levels of labor shortage, and thus, higher costs of electoral intimidation are more willing to support changes in electoral rules that increase the protection of electoral secrecy. In theoretical terms, our findings contribute to the literature linking rural inequality and democratization, by demonstrating the importance of labor scarcity as a source of political cleavages over electoral reforms.

The Elusive Search for Presidential Power

Unilateral presidential actions, such as executive orders, are widely cited as a key strategic tool for presidential power. However, is unilateral action evidence of unilateralism or might it represent executive acquiescence? We answer this by (1) specifying three competing models, each with a different presidential discretion assumption and generating alternative hypotheses; (2) extending the canonical item‐response model to best measure executive‐order significance; and (3) comparing competing theoretical models to data for 1947–2002. Theoretically, we show that legislative preferences may impact unilateral actions differently than previously thought and indicate how parties may be influential. Empirically, a model where the president is responsive to the chamber's majority‐party median fits the data better than models assuming responsiveness to the chamber median or no presidential acquiescence. Unilateral action appears not tantamount to presidential power, as evidence implies that legislative parties, or the judicial actors enforcing their will, are key conditioning factors.