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In this article, the author comments on the researcher Charles S. Bullock's remarks over his research paper "Multivariate Methods in the Analysis of Racially Polarized Voting: Pitfalls in the Use of Social Science by the Courts." The author says that Bullock omits from his discussion the key legal argument for why it is sensible to focus on bivariate rather than multivariate analysis of voting patterns in cases involving challenges brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In amending Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, U.S. Congress sought to return to an effects-based standard of vote dilution. In the Supreme Court's operationalization of that standard in Thornburg the first question to be answered re bloc voting is whether or not voting under the challenged at-large plan is such that "members of different races vote in bloc for different candidates. Moreover, the author is not aware of any case decided since Thornburg in which multivariate methods have been accepted in preference to bivariate ones.

This article interprets historical change in the U.S. Congress in terms of the simplest principal-agent model and demonstrates that profound changes in congressional voting patterns over the course of the twentieth century can be traced mainly to corresponding changes in the economic interests of their constituents. Economists and political scientists have adduced a variety of explanations for why congressmen might rationally choose not to vote consistently for the interests of a majority of constituents. One fact dominates the twentieth-century American economic history which is relevant to this paper, states and regions have become economically more homogeneous.

The article discusses the economic implications of the voting cycle in the U.S. The most familiar example of cycling is perhaps the outcome of a divide-the-dollar game under majority rule. Checking for the presence of cycling is easier in the European countries since they generally have a parliamentary system in which the executive is formed out of a parliamentary majority. The cycling-redistribution hypothesis is more difficult to test on the national level in the U.S. because of the separation of executive and legislative branches. Changes in control of the U.S. House and Senate need not correspond to changes in the party of the president, and vice versa. If cycling were complete, each election would witness the defeat of the incumbent. A strong form of the cycling hypothesis implies that the fraction of elections for which the winning gubernatorial candidate belongs to a different party than the previous winner approaches 1.0. Mancur Olson has argued that differences in growth rates across countries can be explained by differences in the degree of entrenchment of interest groups. The more entrenched interest groups are, the greater the emphasis on zero-sum redistributional issues to the detriment of positive sum issues like growth.

In this paper we describe patterns of party voting, party cohesion and party strength in the U.S. Senate from 1877 through 1986, and repIicate, for the Senate, earlier explanatory models developed for the House of Representatives. We then refine and extend these models to correct for autocorrelation and measurement problems in the replicated analysis. The new analysis demonstrates that cohesion and strength for the two parties in the Senate are driven by different forces. For Democrats, cohesion and strength have been a function of the size of the Southern Democratic contingent. For Republicans, cohesion and strength are a product of membership turnover and presidential partisanship. Finally, we note the close correspondence between the overall patterns of party voting in the Senate and the House and discuss potential causes and implications of this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an examination of the relationship between congressional structure and the phenomenon of informal groups, with emphasis upon the relevance of that relationship to the representation of constituent interests. Informal congressional groups expand the opportunity for members and for Congress collectively to be responsive to constituents. Group membership penetrates the boundaries of committees, subcommittees, parties, and occasionally, the chamber, ameliorating many of the structural constraints on effective representation. Groups play a role in collecting needed information, in placing issues on the legislative agenda and stimulating their consideration, and in mobilizing voting coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the decline of party voting in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1968 is analyzed. The levels of party voting (by Congress) are fitted to a regression line, with the results showing a high period of party voting (1890-1910), an intermediate period (1911-1940), and a low period (1941-1968). A model is developed to measure the effects on party voting of external variables-party homogeneity, party conflict, presidential partisanship, and turnover; and internal variables-centralized leadership and mucus strength. Both types of variables are shown to have some effect, but external-and particularly electoral-variables are more important. Since these variables are culled from contemporary research, the results demonstrate that contemporary hypotheses and findings regarding legislative parties are generalizable over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the voting behavior of freshmen Congressmen of the United States. The writers on Congress have commented on the special position occupied by the freshman Senator or Representative. The freshman Congressman, they suggest, is baffled and handicapped by the rules of procedure, more subject to the social lobby, forbidden by powerful custom from speaking freely, easily controllable through party discipline by the apportionment of committee assignments, and so forth. There have been suggestions that the first-term Representative may be more subject to party discipline, but no systematic analysis has been employed to verify or disprove the proposition. That some practicing politicians believe such a difference does exist. This paper is an attempt to determine whether freshman status had a significant influence upon voting in the House of Representatives on major policy questions during the Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Congresses.

This article presents information on the concerns of the U.S. Congress for the voting machines. These concerns have fueled movements to pass legislation in many states and in the U.S. Congress that would require a paper recording of every vote. However, early experiments indicate that the Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail, designed to do this for direct recording electronic voting machines adds complexity to the tasks that voters, poll workers, and officials perform--increasing confusion and even possibilities for error. Proving program correctness is theoretically unsolvable. Testing large circuits or programs is accomplished by testing them in pieces and for all possible input scenarios. New methodologies for improving code quality, such as extreme programming in which small teams work intensively on component modules, institutionalize good practices of incremental testing. In addition, this technique inherently reduces the ability of any one person to have access to the entire code.

While various scholars of public opinion in the United States explain that the ideology of partisan legislators influences the preferences of partisan voters, the literature within the paradigm of representational politics maintains the reverse--that partisan voters' ideology affects legislators' voting preferences. By employing Vector Autoregression analysis, this article examines whether changes in the preferences of US Congress members lead to changes in the ideology of partisan voters, or vice versa. The findings indicate that the legislators' ideology in the House or Senate has no impact on the preferences of partisan voters as measured by the ANES seven-point ideology scale. Rather, Democratic voters' ideological shift influences the change in Democratic members' preferences in both the Senate and the House. However, Republican vot-ers do not exert equivalent influence on GOP legislators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U.S. legislatures, and supranational organizations. Yet one potentially fruitful laboratory for testing spatial theories, the individual U.S. states, has remained relatively unexploited, for two reasons. First, state legislative roll call data have not yet been systematically collected for all states over time. Second, because ideal point models are based on latent scales, comparisons of ideal points across states or even between chambers within a state are difficult. This article reports substantial progress on both fronts. First, we have obtained the roll call voting data for all state legislatures from the mid-1990s onward. Second, we exploit a recurring survey of state legislative candidates to allow comparisons across time, chambers, and states as well as with the U.S. Congress. The resulting mapping of America's state legislatures has great potential to address numerous questions not only about state politics and policymaking, but also about legislative politics in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The theory of spatial voting has played a large role in the development of important results across many areas of political science. Directly testing the foundational assumptions of spatial voting theory, however, has not been possible with existing data. Using a novel survey design, this article obtains estimates of voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions. The results of this scaling demonstrate that voters possess meaningful ideologies and, furthermore, that these beliefs are strongly related to the sorts of policy proposals considered in Congress. These ideology estimates are then used to uncover the actual relationships between ideology and vote choice for citizens of various types in the 2004 presidential election. Although the choices of independent voters are shown to be largely consistent with the assumptions of spatial voting theory, the decision rules used by partisans differ strongly from what unbiased spatial voting would imply. Although partisans do converge toward the behavior of independents, and hence toward the assumptions of spatial voting theory, as information levels increase, we see that even highly informed partisans show significant differences from what would be implied by unbiased spatial voting theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I use variation across markets in the timing of television's introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout. The estimated effect is significantly negative, accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s. I argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting. As evidence for this, I show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio, and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys. I also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off-year congressional elections, which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 anexplicitexplanation 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between black constituency size and congressional support for black interests has two important attributes: magnitude and stability. Although previous research has examined the first characteristic, scant attention has been directed at the second. This article examines the relationship between district racial composition and congressional voting patterns with a particular emphasis on the stability of support across different types of votes and different types of districts. We hypothesize that, among white Democrats, the influence of black constituency size will be less stable in the South, owing in part to this region's more racially divided constituencies. Examining LCCR scores from the 101st through 103rd Congress, we find that this expectation is largely confirmed. We also find that, among Republicans, the impact of black constituency size is most stable—albeit negligible in size—in the South. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the relative merits of “influence districts” and “majority minority” districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have had limited success empirically demonstrating the importance of political participation. This study shows that political participation matters because it influences political rewards. Political participation, specifically voting, acts as a political resource for geographic groups. Voting is a resource because members of Congress seek to maximize the benefits of Federal budget allocations going to their districts. Members of Congress not only try to direct resources into their districts, but they also attempt to allocate strategically those resources to the areas that provide the best return in terms of votes. Hence, areas within congressional districts that vote at higher rates will be privileged over areas that vote at lower rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the degree of ideological polarization within and between the parties in the U.S. House of Representatives for the period 1963–1996, using the Groseclose, Levitt and Snyder (1996) adjustment method for ADA and ACU scores to ensure over time comparability of roll call voting data. We focus especially on the median House member, since we believe that change in the median offers a better measure of the impact of the change in party control than does changes in the mean roll-call voting score. Our data analysis makes two general points. First and foremost, when we looked at the change in the location of the House median voter, we found a dramatic change after the Republicans gained a majority in the House in 1994. After the Republicans became a majority in the House, the ADA median in the House in 1995–1996 was at 24, far closer to the Republican median of 4 than to the Democratic median of 83. The shift in median from 1993–1994 to 1994–1995 involved a change of over 25 points in one election - far and away the greatest single shift in ideology of the modern era. In contrast, the mean changed only 1 point over this same period. Second, for the three decades we investigated, we found three historical epochs vis a vis the relative locations of the ADA (or ACU) floor median and the ADA (or ACU) floor mean in the U.S. House of Representatives - two inflection points in 1983 and 1994 which are related to trends in regional realignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1978, the vote reported for House incumbents in the American National Election Studies (NES) has been significantly higher than the actual incumbents' vote in the districts surveyed; in NES surveys before 1978, the reported vote was much closer to the actual vote. The prime suspect for the source of this bias is the new question format introduced in 1978 and used in all subsequent studies. We document the problem and review the results of several question-wording experiments that confirm the superior accuracy of a format that does not mention the candidates' names over the ballot format currently in use. We also find evidence that a modified version of the ballot format may reduce the pro-incumbent bias, so that improvement may be possible without a major interruption of the post-1978 NES times series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extends Fiorina's balancing theory by developing and testing inferences from a simple and general spatial model of partisan preference in two institutional dimensions. Focus on party balancing and voting for the United States Congress in the 1996 national election; Voters' nonseparable preferences across the electoral arenas of US government.

Examines the extent to which Congressional representatives' voting behavior reflects underlying contituents' interests during the 95th Congress in the U.S. Types of representatives; Examination of ADA rating scale residuals; Effect of retirement decision on representatives' voting behavior; Simultaneity problem infecting the relationship between legislator shirking and electoral success; Conclusions.

Examines the hypothesis that voter choice on the liberal-conservative continuum affects the income distribution in the U.S. Measurement of income inequality and political bipartisanship; Discussion of the evidence that periods in which conservative strength is high in the Congress are associated with increased inequality; Effects of political and macroeconomic policy on income inequality.

Labor PACs are used to explore the potential congressional influence of campaign contributions from special interest groups. PACs of organized labor are particularly useful for two reasons. First, a set of labor issues are defined each year by the AFL-CIO and so ad-hoc decisions about pertinent legislation are not made by the researcher. Secondly, there are measurable traits of representatives and constituents that may lead to a predisposition of labor support. By combining these two attributes, a model is developed to investigate the question of congressional influence. A wider set of PAC strategies is allowed to operate in this formulation than previous studies. A series of roll-call votes is used to construct an index reflecting the probability that a representative will vote in favor of labor legislation. Therefore, labor PACs may contribute money to various members of congress hoping to sway their vote on a specific issue, a variety of issues, or they may simply want to increase their chances of obtaining access when issues of interest arise. The latter access-oriented strategy may affect the general trend in legislation even though its influence on specific bills is uncertain a priori. Because the dependent variable is a fraction based on samples from binomial populations, a quantal choice model is required. The simultaneous-logit formulation used here allows for the joint determination of PAC dollars and voting probabilities while exploring this discreet choice. The results of this study provide evidence that labor PACs are able to affect legislation. In both congressional terms studies, the tendency of a representative to support labor issues was directly related to the size of campaign contributions from labor PACs. Furthermore, these results suggest that the interaction between funds and legislation ran in both directions, i.e., additional labor funds increased pro-labor votes and at the same time representatives with a predisposition to vote for... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the extent of public reactions to the legislative records of the major parties influence voter's choices among party candidates at mid-term congressional elections in the U.S. Two assumptions about the role of the public can be extracted from these ideas. First, in a system of party government the electorate's attitude toward the parties is based on what the party programs are and how well the parties have delivered on them. The public gives the parties programmatic support. And, in view of the importance that legislative action is likely to have in any party program, such support is formed largely out of public reaction to the legislative performance of the parties. Second, under a system of party government the voters' response to the local legislative candidates is based on the candidates' identification with party programs. These programs are the substance of their appeals to the constituency, which will act on the basis of its information about the proposals and legislative record of the parties. Since the party programs are of dominant importance, the candidates are deprived of any independent basis of support.