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

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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. ***