Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-w7rtg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-24T13:56:00.675Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dimensions in Congressional Voting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Kenneth Koford
Kenneth Koford
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While dimensional studies of congressional voting find a single, ideological dimension, regression estimates find several constituency and party dimensions in addition to ideology. I rescale several unidimensional studies to show their increased classification success over the null hypothesis that votes are not unidimensional. Several null hypotheses are explored. With these null hypotheses, 66%–75% of nonunidimensional roll call votes are nevertheless correctly classified by one dimension. After the rescaling, one dimension succeeds in correctly classifying 25%–50% of the votes, and second and third dimensions are important.

Type
Research Note
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 83 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 949 - 962
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Clausen, Aage. 1973. How Congressmen Decide: A Policy Focus. New York: St. Martin's.Google Scholar
Gausen, Aage, and Cheney, Richard B.. 1970. “A Comparative Analysis of Senate-House Voting on Economic and Welfare Policy 1953–1964.” American Political Science Review 64:138–52.Google Scholar
Collie, Melissa. 1985. “Voting Behavior in Legislatures.” In Handbook of Legislative Research, ed. Loewenberg, Gerhard, Patterson, Samuel C., and Jewell, Malcolm E.. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Collie, Melissa, and Brady, David. 1985. “The Decline of Partisan Voting Coalitions in the House of Representatives.” In Congress Reconsidered, 3d ed., ed. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Oppenheimer, Bruce I.. Washington: Congressional Quarterly.Google Scholar
Coombs, Clyde H. 1964. A Theory of Data. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Deaton, Angus, and Muellbauer, John. 1980. Economics and Consumer Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacquemin, Alexis. 1987. The New Industrial Organization. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kalt, Joseph, and Zupan, Mark. 1984. “Capture and Ideology in the Economic Theory of Politics.” American Economic Review 74:279–300.Google Scholar
Kalt, Joseph, and Zupan, Mark. N.d. “The Apparent Ideological Behavior of Legislators: Testing for Principal-Agent Slack in Political Institutions.” Journal of Law and Economics. Forthcoming.Google Scholar
Kau, James B., Keenan, Donald, and Rubin, Paul H.. 1982. “A General Equilibrium Model of Congressional Voting.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 97:271–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koford, Kenneth. 1987. “Scale Economies and Rent-Seeking in Legislative Parties.” Public Choice 52:35–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koford, Kenneth. 1989. “Dimensions, Transaction Costs and Coalition in Legislative Voting.” California Institute of Technology. Typescript.Google Scholar
Ladha, Krishna K. 1984. “Ideology in Congressional Voting: A Spatial Model of Legislative Choice with Perceptive Error.” Graduate School of Industrial Administration Working Paper. Carnegie-Mellon University.Google Scholar
Peltzman, Sam. 1984. “Constituent Interest and Congressional Voting.” Journal of Law and Economics 27:181–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peltzman, Sam. 1985. “An Economic Interpretation of the History of Congressional Voting in the Twentieth Century.” American Economic Review 75:656–75.Google Scholar
Poole, Keith. 1981. “Dimensions of Interest Group Evaluation of the U.S. Senate 1969–1978.” American Journal of Political Science 25:49–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith. 1984. “Least Squares Metric, Unidimensional Unfolding.” Psychometrika 49:311–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith. 1988. “Recent Developments in Analytical Models of Voting in the U.S. Congress.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 13:117–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith, and Daniels, R. Steven. 1985. “Ideology, Party, and Voting in the U.S. Congress, 1959–1980.” American Political Science Review 79:323–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith, and Rosenthal, Howard. 1985a. “A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science 29:357–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith, and Rosenthal, Howard. 1985b. “The Unidimensional Congress: 1919–1984.” Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans.Google Scholar
Prais, S. J., and Houthakker, Hendrick S.. 1955. The Analysis of Family Budgets. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Russell, R. Robert, and Wilkinson, Maurice. 1979. Microeconomics. New York: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Schneider, Jerrold E. 1979. Ideological Coalitions in Congress. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Schneider, Jerrold E. 1987. “Congressional Coalitions: The Dimensionality Controversy.” Presented at the 1984 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington.Google Scholar
Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1979. “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models.” American Journal of Political Science 23:27–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundquist, James. 1983. Dynamics of the Party System. Rev. ed. Washington: Brookings.Google Scholar
Torgerson, Warren S. 1958. Theory and Methods of Scaling. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
VanDoren, Peter. 1986. “The Limitations of Roll-Call Vote Analysis: An Analysis of the Legislative Energy Proposals 1945–1976.” Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Herbert F. 1978. “Evaluating Theories of Congressional Roll-Call Voting.” American Journal of Political Science 22:554–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.