The Dynamics of Congressional Behavior: Natural Experiments in Roll Call Voting, 1947--1997

172 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.In my dissertation, I utilize a natural experimental methodology to investigate two broad questions. First, I seek to determine how certain political factors influence members' roll call voting behavior in the United States Congress in the years following WWII. Secondly, I investigate how individuals' roll call voting behavior influences their prospects for reelection. More specifically, I focus upon two factors thought to have an influence on members' roll call voting behavior: political parties and constituencies. I find that members who switch party affiliation while serving in Congress make significant changes in their voting behavior at the time they switch parties, while a subset of members who did not switch parties but resembled the party switchers exhibited no significant changes in their roll call behavior. This finding strongly supports the arguments of scholars who contend parties have a significant and independent influence on the roll call behavior of their members. On the constituency side, I find that some members who voluntarily leave Congress either by retirement or to seek statewide office make statistically significant but extremely modest changes in their voting behavior in their last year in office. To assess the effect of roll call behavior on reelection prospects, I revisit the puzzle of midterm seat losses for House members from the president's party, but at the individual level. While I do not offer a general model of roll call behavior, I argue these findings are consistent with a reputation-based explanation of roll call behavior. Members carefully craft their personal reputations of which roll call behavior is an important component. A reputation-based model also helps to make sense of seemingly contradictory findings: that members make big adjustments to their roll call behavior in some instances, while exhibiting only modest changes in others.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Lame-Duck Legislators and Consideration of the Ship Subsidy Bill of 1922

The notion that electoral concerns are strong determinants of roll call voting provides the foundation for many theories of legislative behavior. To measure the importance of electoral considerations, the authors analyze a vote held in an environment in which a sizable number of members faced no electoral constraints: a lame-duck session of the House. The authors analyze the vote on a ship subsidy bill considered in a special lame-duck session of the 67th Congress (1922). In particular, the authors are interested in the possibility that lame-duck members were more inclined to support the politically unpopular proposal and whether they were able to translate that support into political benefits, such as presidential appointments. The authors estimate a series of probit models and find that lame-duck Republicans, notably those defeated in their reelection bids, were significantly more likely to vote in favor of final passage