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While there has been a good bit of scholarly attention paid to career dynamics in—including retirements from—the U. S. House of Representatives, relatively less attention has been paid to the Senate. The few studies of career decisions in the upper chamber (e.g., Bernstein and Wolak 2002; Masthay and Overby 2017) have focused on the more or less modern Senate. In this study, we extend the time series back to the early 1900s, taking in the entire century of the popularly elected Senate. In doing so, we increase our analytical leverage to explore dynamics in the frequency, ratio (compared to electoral defeats), and direction (i.e., progressive ambition or retirement from public life) of voluntary departures from the upper chamber. We are particularly interested in the ability of the parties to retain Senate seats opened up by voluntary departures and focus our multivariate analysis on that question. Among our most noteworthy findings are 1) that the partisan differential in retirements so obvious in the House (with Republicans outpacing Democrats in voluntary departures) is absent not only in the modern Senate but over the entire history of the elected chamber, and 2) that the GOP is systemically better at retaining open seats in the upper chamber, a finding consistent with other work on party asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although retirements are a major source of legislative turnover, research on the topic has been limited, especially outside of the US House of Representatives. In this article, we address this shortcoming by examining retirements in two countries with similar electoral systems yet different legislative environments and party systems: Canada and the United Kingdom. In particular, we extend analysis on the Congress that has consistently shown Republican members retire at higher rates than their Democratic counterparts to examine whether this finding is generalizable to legislators from other parties of the right and/or favouring devolution in other parliamentary settings. In presenting data that support many of these hypotheses, we explore an important normative implication: because their partisan predispositions make them less willing to serve, politicians from parties favouring limited government and/or devolution may be less able to translate their vision of politics into policy because they face systemic problems maintaining legislative seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]