Testing Theories of Legislative Voting: Dimensions, Ideology and Structure
- Creators
- Koford, Kenneth
Abstract
While dimensional studies of legislative voting find a single ideological dimension (Schneider 1979, Poole and Rosenthal 1985b), regression estimates find constituency and party dominant (Kau and Rubin 1979, Peltzman 1984), and ideology secondary (Kalt and Zupan 1984). This paper rescales the dimensional findings to show their improved classification success over the null hypothesis that votes are not unidimensional. With the rescaling, most votes are not explained by one dimension, and several dimensions are important Nevertheless, fewer dimensions are found than constituents' preferences suggest. Thus a model is developed where transactions costs of building coalitions reduce the number of dimensions. When legislative parties build internal coalitions to pass and defeat bills, voting on randomly drawn bills has a single party-oriented dimension. And natural ideological dimensions are reinforced if parties write bills and logroll along natural lines of cohesion.
Additional Information
Comments from Howard Rosenthal, Kenneth Krehbiel, Jeffrey Miller, Jerrold Schneider, Jack Wright and members of the USC/UCLA Microeconomics Workshop were very helpful. They are not implicated in any of these conclusions.Attached Files
Submitted - sswp653.pdf
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:160bded3b4eb5122c8966d8d92ef2783
|
584.5 kB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 81269
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170908-135657742
- Created
-
2017-09-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Social Science Working Papers
- Series Name
- Social Science Working Paper
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 653