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

小行星9422797 本研究涉及三个项目，旨在衡量美国国会和美国州立法机构中政党的相对重要性，并测试有关可能决定政党重要性的一些因素的假设。 这项研究建立在调查员早期关于立法政治和代表性的工作基础上。 第一个项目制定并应用一种程序，以区分立法机构中纯粹由于立法者的偏好相似而进行的“政党投票”和由于政党领导人或政党核心小组的压力而进行的政党投票。 第二个项目扩展了以前开发的空间政党竞争模型，将政党视为自利的个人团体，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：实施一个新的测试的中位数选民假设对假设，政党制定不同的政策;测试的重要性，如党派和“专业”在国家立法决策的因素;和，测试其他假设的政治议程的形成在美国，如“溢出”的重要性，在国家。 ***

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. ***