Examining Congress with a Two-Dimensional Political Space.

In earlier work we have found that it is not innocuous to assume a one-dimensional political space for the purposes of empirical work regarding the US Congress. Analysis that takes into account only the first dimension from an ideal point estimation procedure may be missing important information regarding the underlying structure of politics. In this paper we explore the theoretical underpinnings of the conditional party government argument with a formal model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]