Archive of State Roll Call Collection

对美国立法行为和政策制定的研究主要集中在国会，对州立法机构的政治关注较少。 这是一个错失的机会，因为各州立法机构在许多关键因素上表现出差异，立法理论预测这些因素应该影响这些机构的运作以及它们对选民的反应。 这种比较分析的最大障碍是缺乏数据。 点名记录经常被用来衡量立法者的政策立场以及立法机构内立法党派的凝聚力和力量。 但是，与国会不同的是，各州的唱名表决记录并没有任何便于科学分析的格式。这种数据短缺的解决方法，计算机辅助提取点名数据的各种来源和格式，在这种信息是在国家的发展。这种数据生成方法比传统的手工编码和手动数据输入方法效率更高，更不易出错。该方法已得到很好的发展，因此为1999-2000年届会以及随后为2003-2004年重新划分选区后的立法届会汇编了一套完整的竞争性点名和相应的立法选区总统投票总数。 此外，调查人员还收集了所有州立法机构的点名投票，这些投票可从州立法机构的网站上获得。这包括对74个分庭进行点名，时间从6年到22年不等。 纵向数据对于评估政党控制变化的影响、两极分化的大政党系统的特征以及立法规则和程序的变化尤为重要，1999-2000年的数据已经过全面处理，可供普遍使用。这笔赠款用于处理剩余的数据集，包括提取关键信息和格式化数据，以便适合统计分析和分发给研究界。这一新的数据资源的可用性将为在更大的案例集上测试现有的立法理论和从比较的角度开发新的研究问题提供原始材料。这些数据集将有助于研究人员努力开发有关美国立法机构运作的新知识。 除了这些数据的基础研究价值，该项目有可能通过告知公众对全套美国立法机构的运作的理解，包括改革的影响，如任期限制，选举变化，分裂的政府和重新划分，以及选举变化的影响，如立法机构和州长的政党控制，产生更广泛的影响。

Research on American legislative behavior and policy making has focused primarily on Congress with much less attention to the politics of the state legislatures. This is a missed opportunity because the states legislatures display variation in many of the key factors that legislative theories predict should influence the operations of these bodies and how responsive they are to their electorates. The greatest obstacle to this comparative analysis has been a simple lack of data. Roll call records are frequently used to measure legislators' policy positions as well as the cohesion and strength of legislative parties within legislatures. But, unlike Congress, the records of roll call votes in the states have not been in any easily available format for scientific analyses. This data shortage is addressed with the development of a methodology of computer-assisted extraction of roll call data from the variety of sources and formats in which this information is found in the states. This approach to data generation is dramatically more efficient and less error-prone than traditional methods of hand coding and manual data entry. The methodology has been well-developed so that a complete set of competitive roll calls and matching presidential vote totals for legislative districts were compiled for the 1999-2000 sessions, and subsequently, for the post-redistricting legislative sessions of 2003-2004. In addition the investigator has collected all of the state legislative roll call votes available from state legislative web sites. This includes roll calls for 74 of the chambers covering periods from six to 22 years. The longitudinal data are particularly important for assessing the effects of changes in party control, the character of the larger party systems which has been polarizing, and changes in legislative rules and procedures.The data from 1999-2000 have been fully processed are and available for general use. This grant supports the processing of the remaining data sets, including extraction of the key information and the formatting the data so that it is suitable for statistical analyses and distribution to the research community. The availability of this new data resource will provide the raw materials for testing existing legislative theory on a much larger set of cases and for developing new research questions that derive from a comparative perspective. The data sets will facilitate researchers' efforts to develop new knowledge about the workings of America's legislatures. Beyond the basic research value of these data, the project has the potential for broader impacts by informing public understanding of the operations of the full set of American legislatures including the impacts of reforms such as term limits, electoral change, divided government, and redistricting as well as the effects of electoral change such as party control of the legislatures and governorships.