Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting

Abstract

Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of behavior. This theory posits that there are no party effects independent of preferences and that equilibrium outcomes are located at the chamber's median. The other theories rely on different conceptions of the foundations of party effects and yield distinctive predictions about the legislators who will support bills on final passage votes. After testing, our conclusion is that strong party influences can be found in final passage voting in the House: the partyless theory receives little support, but a model based on majority party agenda control works well. Legislative outcomes are routinely on the majority party's side of the chamber median.

Parties and Procedural Choice in the House Rules Committee

“…In examining other activities in the House, many researchers have discovered evidence that supports the predictions of partisan theories (see Aldrich and Rohde 2000a;Binder, Lawrence, and Maltzman 1999;Lawrence, Maltzman, and Smith 2006;Roberts 2005;Roberts and Smith 2003;Young and Wilkins 2007), and mixed evidence that supports the predictions of informational theories (Marshall 2002;Roberts 2010). My analysis has tested the predictions of differing theories of legislative organization on the use of restrictive rules in the U.S. House and has arrived at conclusions consistent with many of these studies.…”

Exploring Responsiveness in the U.S. House of Representatives

“…This predictor is the multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP) mean estimates from Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2013 Figure 1 shows the correlation between legislators' ideology, using DW-NOMINATE ideal points (Poole and Rosenthal 1997), and the Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2013) mean MRP estimates of constituent ideology. I control for a vector of theoretically relevant covariates that have been found to impact Congressional behavior, including legislators' political parties and their ideologies measured using the DW-NOMINATE scores given the impact of party and ideology on behavior (Lawrence, Maltzman and Smith 2006). I also control for majority party status, which is a 11 dichotomous indicator, given the gatekeeping policy power retained by the majority party (Cox and McCubbins 2005).…”

Legislative Politics as Normal?

“…Roll calls in the EP may be corrupted by strategic considerations, which will affect the inferences we can draw from them. Indeed, even where all votes are recorded by roll call, the range of vote choices and therefore outcomes will be limited by the influence of pre-floor stages of legislative preparation as well as by decisions regarding the floor agenda (Lawrence et al, 2006). Thus, even where members have permission to vote according to their conscience during plenary sessions, parties (particularly those with a majority) may constrain members' voting behaviour by controlling the legislative agenda.…”