THE OPERATIONAL USE OF AN EXPERIENCE TABLE

One objective of the Parole Decision-Making project was the develop ment of experience tables for operational use by the U.S. Board of Parole to aid in individual case deckion-making. This report describes the interaction of parole board members and project staff in the development of an experience table acceptablc to the parole board for operational use. In addition, it describes the development of a research design to test the impact of the presentation of the experience table upon paroling decisions, the implementation of this design, and the initiol evaluation of results.     

The Influence of Governors on Veto Override Attempts: A Test of Pivotal Politics

Abstract Using the “switcher” analysis developed by Krehbiel (1998), we examine the ability of Missouri governors to sway legislators on veto override attempts. Our initial results closely mirror Krehbiel's finding that the chief executive successfully achieves influence at and around the veto pivot, but these results change once we take into account the political party of the legislators. Governors are far more likely to influence legislators from their own party, regardless of legislator ideology. Our study provides a rare systematic analysis of gubernatorial influence in the legislative arena, while also contributing to the current debate over preference‐based versus partisan‐based theories of legislatures.     

Electoral Security of Members of the U.S. House, 1900–2006

Previous studies have documented that the increase in the incumbency advantage in the 1960s did not decrease the probability of defeat of incumbents in the U.S. House. I define a method for establishing bounds on the probability of incumbent defeat and find that it decreases significantly in the 1950s, before the rise of the incumbency advantage. Incumbency advantage does not have a direct relationship with incumbent defeat rates, raising questions about the use of the incumbency advantage as a means for making inferences about the electoral security of incumbents.     

Vote Switchers and Party Influence In the U.S. House

Party‐centered theories of Congress often rely on the critical assumption that some majority party members vote against their preferences when granting their leadership procedural powers, such as closed rules. Such an assumption renders these approaches ad hoc, and thus theoretically dubious, unless firm support for the assumption can be found. Firm support is elusive largely because it is difficult to separate party and preference effects. In this article, we produce a simple but critical test of the party persuasion assumption that largely avoids these measurement problems. Specifically, we use a “switcher analysis” (Krehbiel 1998) to compare votes on final passage of the legislation with the votes on the closed rule. Our analysis of all closed rule‐final passage vote pairs for the 104th–108th Congresses reveals vote patterns that cannot exist absent significant party effects.