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The article discusses the authors' views on the act of electoral connections and political participation on House congressional representatives to roll call votes from 1819 to 1921. He explains that the act of voting can indicate the professional responsibilities of representatives and can signal fulfillment of duties to constituents. The author adds that the adoption of changes in the role of parties, elections, and quorum rules can change the motivation of members in casting roll call votes.

We compare factors within and outside of the legislative arena that influenced legislators' decisions to change party affiliations in Great Britain and the United States in 19th and early 20th centuries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the important linkages between institutional choice and the issue dimensionality in three emergent democratic legislatures. We hypothesize that the adoption of party-centered versus candidate-centered electoral institutions had significant implications for the structure of the roll call behavior of legislators. We expect the roll call voting of legislators selected by party-centered systems to exhibit a lower dimensionality and greater structure than for legislators selected in candidate-centered systems. Using Lewis and Poole's (2004) W-NOMINATE procedure with bootstrapped standard errors, we compare the number of issue dimensions, the aggregate proportional reduction in error (APRE), and the percentage of variance explained by the 1st W-NOMINATE dimension across different electoral systems in the U. S. House of Representatives, the Ukranian Rada, and the Russian Duma. We found that the choice of electoral institutions has notable influences on the nature of roll call behavior, but that country-specific political context appeared to have important behavior implications as well.∗ Paper ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates floor behavior and agenda construction in the House of Representatives across regular and lame duck sessions. Lame duck sessions are comprised of returning and departing members - those who either chose to retire or lost their reelection bids. The presence of these departing members creates a potentially unstable environment as they are no longer constrained by constituent pressure, and are likely insulated from the pressures of legislative party leaders. As a consequence, one might expect to observe significant differences in the nature of proposals considered in the lame duck versus regular sessions of Congress. I utilize a data set comprised of the set of House floor motions with an identifiable sponsor subjected to a roll call vote from the 46th to 109th Congresses. This data set allows me to categorize votes into different categories defined by spatial characteristics, which then allows me to compare the relative frequencies of the different spatial arrays from regular to lame duck sessions to determine whether the presence of lame ducks influences the content of the legislative agenda. Next, I replicate an analysis done by Poole and Smith (1994) to determine whether the strategies of, and subsequently to determine whether the strategies of the MCs making the motions changes across sessions. The results support my hypotheses that lame duck sessions have a significant influence on both the content of the agenda and the strategies of those members making floor motions.∗ ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisan theories of legislative or organization posit that the majority party leadership uses the House rules to advance their agenda, often at the expense of the minority party. Minority party members, though, frequently make motions on the floor that receive recorded roll call votes, a sizable percentage of which actually pass. In this paper, I analyze minority party floor motions to determine how frequently the minority makes such proposals, how often such motions succeed. I then investigate the spatial characteristics of those minority party floor motions that ultimately pass. If the majority party successfully controls floor proceedings, successful minority proposals are crafted explicitly to appeal to a sizable component of the majority party. If, however, such motions successfully split the majority party coalition, one can conclude the majority party was not able to maintain order on the floor. To answer such questions, I analyze a data set comprised of all floor motions with an identifiable sponsor from the 46th to 106th Congresses (1879 to 1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political atmosphere in Congress following Reconstruction through the early 1920s, was marked by high levels of partisan polarization. More specifically, we observe significant intraparty homogeneity coupled with interparty heterogeneity. Most inquiries about the role of parties during the era, though, focus almost exclusively on the Republicans and the leadership of Reed and Cannon. Little has been done to explore the behavior of congressional Democrats during the era. In this paper, we compare Democratic and Republican party cohesion scores to determine whether Democratic leaders utilized some of the tools associated with Conditional Party Government. We analyze the parties’ committee assignments to determine whether service on committees was contingent on party loyalty. We find significant differences between the parties’ assignment practices and found that Republicans placed a premium on party loyalty, while the Democrats did not. We conclude that important differences in Democratic and Republican constituencies best explains the different effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars agree that the electoral concerns of members of Congress influence roll call voting behavior. I revisit the question by investigating the roll call behavior in lame duck sessions of Congress. More specifically, I explore turnout on roll call votes to determine first whether lame duck sessions differed from regular sessions, and, second, whether lame duck members exhibited behavior distinct from returning members. I analyze both individual- and roll call-level turnout data from 42nd to 71st Congresses to assess how a combination of individual, institutional, and partisan factors influence participation rates. I found that departing MCs reduced their level of participation in their final lame duck session, while returning members actually increase their rates of participation. I also conclude that overall abstention rates on roll calls held in lame duck sessions do not systematically differ from votes held in regular sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the policy consequences of lame-duck sessions in detail, examining whether the potential agency problem in representation significantly affects economic decision making in Congress. To this point, such an analysis has not been pursued systematically in the political science or economics literatures; thus, our findings will break new ground and structure future research for years to come. Moreover, a detailed examination of the policy consequences of lame-duck sessions is desperately needed; while lame-duck sessions were once somewhat rare, they have become regular congressional events in recent years, convening in six of the last seven Congresses. And as important economic legislation - like regular appropriations bills, as well as specific bills, like a new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) - has passed in recent lame-duck sessions, understanding how they function has clear policy relevance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Illinois Senate is the only one of the 101 legislative chambers in the United States that simultaneously seats members serving terms of different lengths. (The senates of Minnesota and New Jersey vary term length across sessions for their entire memberships, on a 2-4-4 plan, in order to synchronize elections and decennial post-census redistricting. Every other chamber has only one term length (2-, 4-, or 6- years), with the partial exception of members appointed or specially elected to complete terms begun by others.) Under the current (1970) Illinois Constitution, following redistricting, the 59 senate seats are divided into three (nearly) equal-sized classes, with terms of: 2, 4, and 4; 4, 2, and 4; or 4, 4, and 2 years. Hence, the proportion of Senators whose terms are expiring cycles across elections, starting in the first election on a new map, as 100%, 33%, 66%, 66%, 33%, and then back to 100% to begin again with a revised electoral map. Because of staggering of terms, many chambers feature members with varying time horizons (years until expiration of their present term) at any given moment. But only the Illinois Senate normally elects members simultaneously for differing periods of office.This anomalous arrangement constitutes an ideal natural experiment for studying the effects of term length. Both cross-sectional comparison of chambers and time-series analysis of changes within a given chamber require difficult model specification, to control for myriad factors other than term length that distinguish cases (chambers or periods). In modern Illinois, by contrast, we can rather directly observe the effects of term length on such matters as: retirement rates; campaign expenditures; average challenger quality; and voter turnout. In this paper, we catalog some fairly simple and direct predictions about term length and electoral behavior, and we test these with data from ther period 1972-2006. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I study the behavioral consequences of party defection on three sets of roll call votes: final passage, amendment, and procedural votes. I posit that switchers exhibit greater changes on procedural and amendment votes than on final passage votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Majority party leaders in the US House are charged with the task of protecting their partisan coalition from internal division. Party leaders carefully craft a legislative agenda to prevent the possibility that potentially divisive issues reach the floor for consideration. One obvious source of potentially divisive floor motions is the minority party. One might argue that a strong interpretation of partisan theories of legislative organization predict minority party motions never reach the floor. A quick perusal of the House roll call records show that minority party members do indeed bring forth motions that receive consideration on the floor. In this paper, I seek to determine what type of minority party motions receive consideration, why they reach the floor, and whether or not they are successful. I use a data set comprised of floor motions from the 46th to 78th and 86th to 106th Congresses to analyze minority party motions across important political eras in the US House. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]