Uncertainty and Roll‐Call Voting in Lame‐Duck Sessions of the U.S. House, 1969–2010

Lame‐duck sessions of Congress have become increasingly common of late. Such sessions are marked by higher levels of ideological and participatory shirking among departing members, creating a more uncertain legislative environment. I investigate the consequences of such shirking on coalition formation and roll‐call behavior. I analyze House roll‐call votes held in the 12 congresses that convened lame‐duck sessions from 1969 to 2010 (91st to 111th Congresses) to assess how roll‐call behavior changes across sessions. I find subtle but statistically significant changes across sessions consistent with claims regarding greater uncertainty in roll‐call voting in lame‐duck sessions.     

The Contribution of Comparative Research to Measuring the Policy Preferences of Legislators

Comparative legislative research has contributed to an examination of the validity of roll‐call votes as measures of legislators' policy preferences. It has prompted an awareness of the influence of legislative structure on the composition of the voting record. Comparative research on members' ideal points has confronted the problems of selection effects, abstentions, the influence of the agenda setter, and the effect of party strategy. It has encouraged the search for alternate measures of members' preferences, including members' speech, cosponsorship, survey responses, and party manifestos. In the non‐American setting, ideal points have been regarded as group‐level, as well as individual‐level, variables. The game‐theoretic approach to the study of legislatures has led to the formulation of hypotheses relating legislative structure to members' ideal points.     

Tarnishing Opponents,Polarizing Congress: The House Minority Party and the Construction of the Roll‐Call Record

Existing research on congressional parties tends to focus almost exclusively on the majority party. I argue that the inattention to the House minority party hampers our understanding of the construction of the roll‐call record and, consequently, our understanding of the sources of polarization in congressional voting. Employing an original data set of House members' requests for recorded votes between 1995 and 2010, I demonstrate that votes demanded by the minority party are disproportionately divisive and partisan and make Congress appear considerably more polarized based on commonly used measures. Moreover, minority‐requested votes make vulnerable members of the majority appear more partisan and ideologically extreme.     

Third Parties,Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress

What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related to Populist issues. The results are consistent with two claims. First, co‐optation of the Populist Party's issues occurred even before the formation of the party. Second, the co‐optation of Populist policies does not appear to be correlated with the electoral success of the Populist candidates.     

Agreeing to Disagree: Agenda Content and Senate Partisanship, 1981–2004

This article presents evidence that the recent increase in partisanship in Senate roll‐call voting is partly due to changes in the content of the Senate agenda. The analysis draws on an original dataset classifying Senate roll‐call votes from 1981 to 2004 according to substantive issue content. Over the past two decades, the types of issues that were most divisive along partisan lines in earlier periods became progressively more prominent on the Senate roll‐call agenda. Even when one controls for the effects of other electoral and institutional factors, one finds that the shifting agenda notably contributed to the rise in Senate partisanship.     

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.     

Presidential Support in the Russian State Duma

Recent comparative research on presidential systems has analyzed the ways in which presidents build majorities for their legislative agendas. Through an analysis of roll‐call votes from the 2000‐03 Russian State Duma on a set of issues reflecting President Putin's legislative agenda, I examine the impact of parliamentary party affiliation, policy preferences, issue type, and electoral mandate type on structuring floor support for the president. I also assess the implications of a mixed electoral system for building legislative coalitions in multiparty legislatures. Further, my findings shed light on Putin's recent reforms of the Duma's rules and procedures and the country's electoral system.     

Senate Apportionment as a Source of Political Inequality

Political scientists have long known that the equal representation of states in the U.S. Senate and the placement of state lines might disadvantage politically relevant groups, granting some citizens greater voting weight in the chamber. Yet we lack systematic, longitudinal evidence that identifies the groups disadvantaged by Senate malapportionment, the sources of this disadvantage, and probes the policy consequences. In this article, I compare each state's liberalism and racial composition with its relative voting weight in the Senate over time. Additionally, I examine whether roll‐call coalitions in the Senate map onto these patterns of state ideology and racial composition.     

Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points

Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates from cosponsorship data. We find that the ability to estimate ideal points from cosponsorship data is contingent on the underlying data‐generating process; reliance on such measures requires strong and often unrealistic assumptions.     

Religion in the Legislative Arena: Affiliation,Salience, Advocacy,and Public Policymaking

Religion is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that informs politics in various ways. This article examines the effects of religious affiliation, religious salience, and religious group advocacy on roll‐call voting in the Wisconsin state legislature. Various studies have demonstrated the impact of religious affiliation on legislative politics, but our use of additional religious indicators allows us to model the religious effect in a more accurate and nuanced manner. Using data from an original survey of state legislators, we utilized structural equation modeling to measure the direct and indirect effects of these religious factors on both the general pattern of roll‐call voting and voting on a high‐salience issue, abortion. Ultimately, the findings indicate that, even when we control for political party affiliation, which is a dominant influence on roll‐call voting, conservative Protestant religious affiliation and high religious salience influence legislative voting. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future studies of religion in the legislative arena.     

Gender Turnover and Roll‐Call Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives

A number of studies suggest that the gender of a legislator affects his or her congressional ideology. We argue that these studies may have produced misleading results because of insufficient controls for constituency influences. To better account for constituency effects, we use a longitudinal research design based on electoral turnover, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. We apply ordinary least squares regression to data from the 103d, 104th, and 105th Houses of Representatives and estimate the effect of gender turnover on changes in DW‐NOMINATE roll‐call voting scores. We find that, when we sufficiently control for both party and constituency influences, gender is not a determinant of the liberalness of a representative's roll‐call voting behavior.     

Party Caucuses and Coordination: Assessing Caucus Activity and Party Effects

Party caucuses are increasingly important to members' allocation of time. This article reports findings from new data on the minutes, frequency, timing, and attendance of House party caucus meetings. I argue that the party caucuses increasingly affect political and policy information flows to members. This growing party coordination has resulted in a greater bonding and shared strategic information among rank‐and‐file copartisans. This research also contributes to the party effects literature. Earlier research on congressional partisanship has used roll‐call data to measure both member preferences and party effects. I investigate whether or not members' attendance at party caucus meetings immediately prior to key congressional votes imposes partisan cohesion beyond members' preferences. The results indicate that party coordination contributes to greater congressional party unity on key floor votes at both the bill and member level controlling for members' ideological preferences. This party coordination effect occurs even during a period of high intraparty preference homogeneity.     

Party Unity in the Swiss Parliament: The Electoral Connection

This study investigates the connection between legislative and electoral politics in Switzerland. The authors postulate that party unity is higher in an election year, and more specifically in votes on issues that are important for the party platform and that are of greater visibility to voters. The authors analyse the entire voting record of the Swiss parliament (lower house) on legislative acts between 1996 and 2007, which consists of roll call votes as well as unpublished votes. The authors find a strong effect of elections on voting unity among certain parties, and also find encouraging support for the hypotheses that this effect is mediated by the visibility of the vote and related issue salience.     

Comparing Cosponsorship and Roll‐Call Ideal Points

We use bill cosponsorship and roll‐call vote data to compare legislators' revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal‐component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House (1973–2000) and Argentine Chamber (1983–2002). The ideal‐point estimates of legislators' revealed preferences based on cosponsorship data strongly correlate with similar estimates derived from roll‐call vote data. Also, cosponsorship activity in the U.S. House has lower dimensionality than cosponsorship has in the Argentine Chamber. We explain this lower discrimination as a function of individual‐ and district‐level factors in both countries.     

Ideology and Polarization Among Women State Legislators

In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.     

Institutional Change,Party Discipline,and the House Democratic Caucus, 1911–19

Abstract The House Democratic Caucus of 1911 to 1919 is a largely understudied institution in the literature on congressional party government, despite the claims of many scholars that the caucus functioned as a significant instrument of party government by binding legislators' floor votes. An analysis of roll‐call votes, new data from the caucus journal, and contemporary accounts from the period indicate that these claims are largely exaggerated, although the caucus did, on occasion, improve floor discipline within the party. I find that intraparty homogeneity on crosscutting issues was related to caucus success. In addition, I argue that the adoption and use of the binding caucus can best be understood from the “multiple goals” viewpoint of congressional politics. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of party‐based institutions in Congress.     

Disentangling the Role of Ideology and Partisanship in Legislative Voting: Evidence from Argentina

We present a novel approach to disentangle the effects of ideology, partisanship, and constituency pressures on roll‐call voting. First, we place voters and legislators on a common ideological space. Next, we use roll‐call data to identify the partisan influence on legislators' behavior. Finally, we use a structural equation model to account for these separate effects on legislative voting. We rely on public opinion data and a survey of Argentine legislators conducted in 2007–08. Our findings indicate that partisanship is the most important determinant of legislative voting, leaving little room for personal ideological position to affect legislators' behavior.     

The Strategic Use of Legislative Voting Procedures

Legislative votes can be taken by roll call—noting the position of each individual member—or by some form of indication (sitting or standing, shouting yea or nay, etc.)—noting only an aggregate outcome. Cameral rules define one method of voting as the standard operating procedure and how to invoke any alternative voting methods. We develop a series of hypotheses related to position taking to explain why, when procedures would typically lead to a vote taken by indication, legislators choose to vote by roll call—a means that makes it much easier for actors outside the chamber to observe the positions taken by individual legislators and partisan blocs. With data from Argentina and Mexico, we test these hypotheses regarding the strategic choice of vote procedures and their relationship to observed party unity.     

Distinguishing Between Influences on Brazilian Legislative Behavior

Ideal point estimators hold the promise of identifying multiple dimensions of political disagreement as they are manifested in legislative voting. However, standard ideal point estimates do not distinguish between ideological motivations and voting inducements from parties, coalitions, or the executive. In this article we describe a general approach for hierarchically identifying an ideological dimension using an auxiliary source of data. In the case we consider, we use an anonymous survey of Brazilian legislators to identify party positions on a left‐right ideology dimension. We then use this data to distinguish ideological motivations from other determinants of roll‐call behavior for eight presidential‐legislative periods covering more than 20 years of Brazilian politics. We find that there exists an important nonideological government‐opposition dimension, with the entrance and exit of political parties from the governing coalition appearing as distinct shifts in ideal point on this second dimension. We conjecture that the Brazilian president's control over politically important resources is the source of this dimension of conflict, which has recently become far more important in explaining roll‐call voting than the ideological dimension.