Empirical Determinants of Bicameral Sequence in State Legislatures

In a previous article (Rogers 1998), I showed that the bicameral chamber that originates enacted legislation tends to realize policy outcomes closer to the preference of its median legislator than does the chamber that votes second on legislation. All things being equal, this “first‐mover advantage” implies that each chamber could be expected to originate roughly half of all enacted legislation. But all other things are not equal in U.S. state bicameral legislatures. Drawing on an expanded dataset, I innovate and test a number of additional hypotheses related to bicameral voting sequence. My results account for the effects of constitutional, institutional, and electoral variables on bicameral sequence.     

Economic Assistance to Impoverished Americans

This study examined the relationship between a measure of public assistance to poor families (adjusted for cost of living differences among SMSAs) and crime rates. The regression analyses controlled for the effects of several other economic and noneconomic factors thought to influence variation in crime rates and utilized census and other data for the S9 SMSAs for which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provided cost-of-living data in 1970. The results indicated that level of public assistance to poor families had an independent negative effect on the variation of several crime rates, including rates of homicide, rape, and burglary. The results suggest that a substantial reduction in the level of public assistance to the poor may contribute to significant increase in crime rates.     

RANDOM ASSIGNMENT TO TREATMENT GROUPS:

A persistent problem in evaluation research relates to the difficulty of using true experimental designs. In particular, random assignment of subjects to treatment groups is both very important to insure the internal validity of the design and very difficult to implement due to logistical and ethical aspects of field research. This paper reports on a strategy for randomization which was adapted to judicial research: specifically to the evaluation of o program for adjudicating minor traffic offenders. It is demonstrated that through careful planning and coordination, designs involving random assignment can be instituted without involving significant difficulties.