Measuring Political Party Influence in the U.S. Congress and State Legislatures

9422797 Snyder这项研究涉及三个项目，旨在衡量政党在美国国会和美国州立法机构中的相对重要性，并测试一些可能决定政党重要性的因素的假设。这项研究建立在研究者早期关于立法政治和代表制的工作基础上。第一个项目开发并应用了一种程序，用于区分立法机构中仅仅由于立法者偏好相似而进行的“政党投票”和由于政党领导人或政党预选会议施加压力而进行的政党投票。第二个项目扩展了先前开发的空间政党竞争模型，该模型将政党视为自利个体的群体，而不是单一的决策者。最后，第三个项目调查出现在州选票上的倡议和公民投票。本研究有三个目标：针对政党制定不同政策的假设，对中间选民假设进行新的检验；检验党派主义和“专业主义”等因素在州立法决策中的重要性；此外，为了检验有关各州政治议程形成的其他假设，比如跨州“溢出效应”的重要性。＊＊＊

9422797 Snyder This research involves three projects designed to measure the relative importance of party in the U.S. Congress and the U.S. state legislatures, and to test hypotheses about some of the factors that may determine the importance of party. The research builds on the investigator's earlier work on legislative politics and representation. The first project develops and applies a procedure for distinguishing between "party voting" in legislatures that is due solely to similarity in legislators' preferences, and party voting that is due to pressure from party leaders or party caucuses. The second project extends a previously developed model of spatial party competition that treats political parties as groups of self-interested individuals, not as monolithic decision makers. Finally, the third project investigates initiatives and referenda that appear on state ballots. This research has three goals: to implement a new test of the median voter hypothesis against the hypothesis that political parties enact different policies; to test for the importance of factors such as factionalism and "professionalism" in state legislative decision making; and, to test other hypotheses about political agenda formation in the states, such as the importance of "spillovers" across states. ***