D-Nominate after 10 Years: A Comparative Update to Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting

This paper updates the findings in Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting and compares them to findings for both European legislatures and the United Nations General Assembly. Congress argues that important episodes in American political and economic history can be better underst...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Legislative studies quarterly 2001-02, Vol.26 (1), p.5-29
Main Authors: Poole, Keith T., Rosenthal, Howard
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Congressional voting
Coordinate systems
Crossnational Analysis
Estimation
Europe
Legislative Bodies
Legislators
Legislatures
Parliaments
Political Ideologies
Political parties
Political Systems
Spatial models
United Nations
United States of America
Upper houses
Utility functions
Voting
Voting Behavior
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Summary:This paper updates the findings in Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting and compares them to findings for both European legislatures and the United Nations General Assembly. Congress argues that important episodes in American political and economic history can be better understood by supplementing or reinterpreting more traditional analyses with the basic space theory of ideology. In Congress, we measured ideology with D-NOMINATE scores. Here we summarize new estimations that are complete through the 105th Congress. We find that the trend to polarization and unidimensionality identified in Congress has continued unabated. The shift to Republican control after the 1994 elections is part of this trend and does not represent a sharp break in roll-call-voting behavior. Comparison of NOMINATE results for the United States to those for other legislatures both further indicates the ideological character of roll-call voting in Congress and suggests that low-dimensional spatial models apply as well to multiparty systems as to two-party systems.
ISSN:0362-9805
DOI:10.2307/440401