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A Further Look at Universalism and Partisanship in Congressional Roll Call Voting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Brian J. Gaines
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 361 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801-3696. e-mail: bjgaines@uiuc.edu
Brian R. Sala
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-8682. e-mail: brsala@ucdavis.edu

Extract

This note extends Melissa P. Collie's “Universalism and the Parties in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1921–80,” American Journal of Political Science 32, 4 (November 1988): 865–883. Detecting a strongly negative correlation between the time series of universalism and partisanship in roll call votes for the 67th through 96th U.S. Houses, Collie concluded that consensus and partisanship are alternative, rival means of organizing legislative activity. If robust, this finding ought not to be time- or chamber-specific: it should be in evidence over the whole (partisan) histories of both House and Senate, session by session. Moreover, the inverse relationship should persist under alternative operationalizations of both partisanship and universalism. Using several measures of partisanship and universalism, mostly based on roll call votes tabulated for sessions of Congress, we reassess this relationship for the 43rd through 105th Congresses. Collie's core finding persists for both chambers over the longer time span provided that one uses her measures. But results are weaker when sessions of Congress rather than Congresses are used as units of observation, and alternative operationalizations of partisanship and universalism do not strongly replicate the original finding.

Type
Replications
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Society for Political Methodology 

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