Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Advancing Theoretical and Empirical Models of Legislative Voting Behavior

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Support investigation examines the sources of 1) legislator policy "location" on roll call votes, and 2) legislator voting consistency, or variance around this location. The study begins with the common wisdom that legislators select a policy location based on their constituency, party, and ideology. However, legislators also decide whether their primary goal is to gain re-election, advance within the party, or pursue policy outcomes, and this determination impacts their positioning as well. Furthermore, this study posits novel models of mass voting and committee assignment behavior that influence legislator location. To test the roll call model requires an accurate measure of legislator ideology, independent of party and constituency, and a determination of legislators' goals. This project surveys 700 former members of the United Sates congress to elicit their current ideology and their goals when in office. Analysis of this data will produce unbiased estimates of the impact of constituency, party, and ideology on voting behavior. Next, the study hypotheses that voting consistency is a function of district diversity, party heterogeneity, and member ambivalence. The proposed survey will yield measures of member policy ambivalence, and thus permit a variance model to be tested for the first time.