State Policy Priorities and Congressional Voting Behavior.

In this paper we focus on a previously unexamined route for constituency preferences to influence Congressional voting behavior. Jacoby and Schneider (2001) find that public opinion (as measured through state partisanship) plays a strong role in determining state policy priorities. States allocate resources to meet societal needs in different ways. These allocations are variable across states (Gray 1999; Nathan 1996; Rivlin 1992), and when measured can give us a good idea about what types of programs specific states like to spend their money on. States that prefer certain groups of programs to others usually do so because there is a constituency base that prefers these groups of programs. We argue that these state policy priorities should have an effect independent of other variables on the voting behavior of state delegations to the US Congress.The measure of state policy priorities is calculated using state general expenditures in 15 policy areas. Jacoby and Schneider (2001) find that state spending tends to group into two different categories, particularized benefits and collective goods. We hypothesize that delegations from states which focus spending on collective goods will be more likely to support collective goods policies with roll call votes in Congress, while state delegations from states which focus spending on particularized benefits will be more likely to support policies addressing particularized benefits. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]