A New Method for Measuring Legislative Content and Change

Abstract

This article has four purposes: (1) to show that it is important to develop a satisfactory way to conceptualize and measure legislative content and change;(2) to propose criteria for evaluating measurement procedures, show that past approaches are inadequate, and propose an improved approach; (3) to apply the approach to voting by the U.S. Senate on Vietnam-related roll calls, 1964-1973; (4) to assess the validity of the approach. The proposed approach involves defining the relevant universe of content more narrowly than in most previous work and using Smallest Space Analysis to derive dimensions and locate items on them. A substantively interpretable three-dimensional solution is found, and the scores given legislative items behave statistically in ways that would be expected of valid measures. his paper has four purposes: ( 1 ) to show that it is important to develop adequate measures of legislative content and change;(2) to show that present methods are unsatisfactory;(3) to propose a new method and apply it to Senate voting on Vietnam war bills; (4) to test the validity of the new method in some simple ways. MEASURING LEGISLATIVE CHANGEInterest has increased recently in work that attempts to gauge statistically how inputs into the political process-social, at RYERSON UNIV on June 18, 2015 smr.sagepub.com Downloaded from

Party Polarization in the US Congress

“…Over the course of their careers, however, their records may have become more and more extreme. In explaining the timing of policy adoptions, Asher and Weisberg (1978: 393-4), Brady and Sinclair (1984), Burstein (1978Burstein ( , 1980 and Jones (1974) find small, but pervasive, member conversions. While earlier scholars of vote changing may have pegged conversions as the explanation, the more recent studies of polarization downplay the role of adaptation.…”

Former Republican Representatives and Party Polarization in the U.S. Senate

“…16 The Gingrich 16 Burnham (1970), Brady and Lynn (1973), Ginsberg (1973Ginsberg ( , 1976, Brady (1978Brady ( , 1991, Bond and Fleisher (2004) attribute changes in Congress to the replacement of members. On the other hand, Asher and Weisberg (1978, 393-4), Brady and Sinclair (1984), Burstein (1978Burstein ( , 1980, and Jones Senators were more polarizing than the members they replaced. On average, each switch to a Gingrich Senator led to an increase of 0.162 in the polarization score for that Senate seat.…”

Ideology, Specificity, and the Coding of Legal Documents: What Do Measures of Constitutional Content Measure?

“…We suggest they refer to Kochran (1973), Stetson and Wright (1975), Berk et al (1977), Burstein (1978), and Ratner (1977; forthcoming). All deal extensively with the content analysis of legislation, and the latter three in particular include bibliographies of the vast political science literature on the subject.…”