Dimensions, Issues, and Bills: Appropriations Voting on the House Floor

One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relativel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 72; no. 4; pp. 976 - 989
Main Authors Crespin, Michael H., Rohde, David W.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.10.2010
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Appropriations
Bills
Congressional voting
Conservatism
Legislation
Legislative Bodies
Legislatures
Liberalism
Military defense
Political analysis
Political parties
Roll Call
Standard deviation
Statistical median
Subcommittees
Voting
Voting Behavior
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Summary:One of the fundamental findings in the congressional literature is that one or sometimes two dimensions can successfully describe roll-call voting. In this paper we investigate if we can reach the same conclusions about low dimensionality when we divide the roll-call agenda into subsets of relatively homogeneous subject matter. We are primarily interested in the degree to which the same ordering of representatives is yielded across these different groups of votes. To conduct our analysis we focus on all roll calls on the 13 annual appropriations bills across eight congresses. When we concentrate on these smaller issue areas, we find that voting is multidimensional and members do not vote in a consistent ideological fashion across all issue areas.
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ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1017/S0022381610000472