Testing Explanations of Strategic Voting in Legislatures: A Reexamination of the Compromise of 1790

A difficult yet prevalent problem in legislative politics is how to assess explanations when observable actions may not represent true (and unobserved) legislator preferences. We present a method for analyzing the validity of theoretical/historical accounts that unifies theory, history, and measurement. We argue that approaches to testing accounts of legislative behavior which are theoretically and historically agnostic are not always best and present an approach which: (1) forms an explicit explanation of behavior (here a simple dynamic voting game) that yields estimable parameter constraints, and (2) tests these constraints using a customized empirical model that is as consistent as possible with the explanation. We demonstrate the method using legislative voting data from the first Congress (1789–1791). Using the idea of sophisticated equivalents from voting theory we subject the traditional account of the “Compromise of 1790” to a statistical test and find that there is reason to doubt the claim that legislators of the time believed the specified log roll was taking place. The results suggest that the capital location and assumption issues were resolved independently.     

A House Divided? Roll Calls,Polarization, and Policy Differences in the U.S. House, 1877–2011

The study of political conflict in legislatures is fundamental to understanding the nature of governance, but also difficult because of changes in membership and the issues addressed over time. Focusing on the enduring issue of civil rights in the United States since Reconstruction, we show that using current methods and measures to characterize elite ideological disagreements makes it hard to interpret or reconcile the conflicts with historical understandings because of their failure to adequately account for the policies being voted upon and the consequences of the iterative lawmaking process. Incorporating information about the policies being voted upon provides a starkly different portrait of elite conflict—not only are contemporary parties relatively less divided than is commonly thought, but the conflict occurs in a smaller, and more liberal, portion of the policy space. These findings have important implications for a broad range of work that uses elite actions to compare political conflict/polarization across time.     

Integrating Voting Theory and Roll Call Analysis: A Framework

Scholars of legislative studies typically use ideal point estimatesfrom scaling procedures to test theories of legislative politics.We contend that theory and methods may be better integratedby directly incorporating maintained and to be tested hypothesesin the statistical model used to estimate legislator preferences.In this view of theory and estimation, formal modeling (1) providesauxiliary assumptions that serve as constraints in the estimationprocess, and (2) generates testable predictions. The estimationand hypothesis testing procedure uses roll call data to evaluatethe validity of theoretically derived to be tested hypothesesin a world where maintained hypotheses are presumed true. Wearticulate the approach using the language of statistical inference(both frequentist and Bayesian). The approach is demonstratedin analyses of the well-studied Powell amendment to the federalaid-to-education bill in the 84th House and the Compromise of1790 in the 1st House.     

Diffusion Pathways for Electricity Deregulation

Quantitative studies of the diffusion of policy innovationsgenerally avoid cases where the appropriate governmental actoris ambiguous; this study focuses on just that context. An event-historyanalysis of U.S. electricity sector regulatory reforms involvingboth regulators and legislators between 1993 and 1999 is presentedhere. The interplay of branches and planes of government significantlyinfluences this diffusion process, suggesting that diffusionresearchers should more often focus explicitly on such dynamics.     

Police authority and reform in Augustan Rome and nineteenth-century England

This paper examines the police reforms of Augustan Rome and nineteenth-century England against the back-ground of the sociohistorical conditions within which they occurred. It reveals that the localism of reforms in Rome and the centralizing reforms of England were part and parcel of the traditional and modern societies from which they developed. Although this analysis offers few, if any, unequivocal historical lessons concerning the local autonomy and public accountability of modern law enforcement, it does reveal one of its basic dilemmas. Today's police work rests upon a legal rational system of social organization. It is, nevertheless, carried out within the exigencies of local communities of which it is though to be responsive. This dualism between universalistic and particularistic principles underlies current discussions of crime control and order maintenance. Attempts to dissolve this dilemma by focusing upon crime control or order maintenance to the exclusion of the other are inadequate inasmuch as the dilemma belongs to the very structure of society. Consequently, solutions such as external review boards and monitoring agencies or civilian monitoring organizations seem more appropriate as a means of maintaining the presence of universal norms while at the same time increasing levels of public accountability.     

Returning to Delinquency: Factors Effecting the Survivorship of Juvenile Shoplifters

This article examines a program designed to provide a family court with a means of lessening the probability that youths on probation for shoplifting will return to criminal behavior. A single staff member within the family court screened possible participants, all of whom were defined as first-time shoplifting offenders and had been assigned to formal or informal probation. Each individual was invited to participate in a four-hour clinic, during which time the realities and possible consequences of shoplifting were explained. If they were able to successfully complete six months of supervised probation, then only the administrative record remained; the conviction itself was expunged. Over a period of nine months, a total of 154 juveniles were invited; however, only 100 actually took part in all facets of the program. A total of 30 clinic attendees and 14 nonparticipants were excluded from the present analysis, owing to missing data, or the fact that at the time of follow-up, they were legally classified as adults. The prior and subsequent court contacts of 110 subjects are reviewed. While less than 3% of either group had subsequent shoplifting arrests, nearly 26% of the program group and 35% of the nonparticipants were rearrested. Factors associated with long-term success and failure are examined. Possible reasons for these observations are discussed, with specific grounding in the shoplifting literature and the concepts of juvenile diversion and “net-widening.”