Party Structuring of Roll Call Votes: A Seven Chamber Comparison.

For decades the study of state legislatures has been a popular focus for research within the field of political science. Earlier studies performed in partisan legislatures have confronted issues such as professionalism, electoral studies and formation of caucuses and committee systems. Recently, as the field has delved deeper into this area as a result of ?devolution,? more studies have been performed on areas of legislative behavior: the impact of political parties, district constituencies, and interest groups on roll calls, to name just a few. Though much research has been conducted on state legislatures in general, few studies have analyzed vote structuring and its effects on institutional conflict and cohesion across more than one of two legislatures or over more than a few sessions. This paper uses over 5,000 roll calls from six different legislatures during a five-year period in an effort to capture the effects of voting behavior and structure across a variety of institutional arrays. The differences between one-party, party-less and transitional two-party systems are also examined in an effort to determine how the impact of party varies across these legislatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]