Assessing presidential influence in Congress requires accurate measures of legislators' baseline preferences. Common strategies extract preferences from roll‐call votes. One approach selects votes most likely to reveal uncorrupted, sincere preferences, and the other, NOMINATE, derives summaries of members' positions from large samples of votes. This article finds that NOMINATE scores do not accurately recover the relative positions of members in simulated legislatures. Errors increase with the number of policy dimensions and do not depend on agenda control or on vote trading. However useful NOMINATE is for summarizing voting patterns, this article cautions against this approach to measuring legislators' preferences.
This article examines the factors that condition citizens’ attitudes toward genetically modified (GM) foods by considering individual-level attitudes in 15 European Union member states. Previous research has shown that European attitudes toward GM foods are influenced by overall levels of scientific literacy, consumer exposure to media coverage, and broader socio-political preferences. This article seeks to expand on this literature by testing some of these explanations in a multivariate analysis. To test our propositions, we develop and estimate a logistic regression model using data derived from Eurobarometer surveys. While the sources of information that people value and their attitudes toward EU policy in related areas explain to some extent support for GM foods, our strongest finding confirms the importance of public understanding of science as a basis for support for this emerging technology.
We introduce a view of congressional party leaders as strategic manipulators of issue dimensions, similar in spirit to Riker's (1982, 1986) heresthetics. Party leaders have incentives to add to bills content from a secondary dimension in order to attract moderates’ support. This strategy can be cheaper than compromising along the liberal-conservative dimension. Empirically, moderates differ in their second-dimension preferences from non-moderates–a necessary condition for the strategy to work as we suggest it might. House passage of a 1997 emergency appropriations bill illustrates this strategy. Our view of party leadership challenges to some extent the argument that legislative parties reduce the dimensionality of congressional decision making and questions the one-dimensional picture of congressional politics.
Congressional theories offer competing explanations of the role of restrictive amendment rules in the U.S. House (Krehbiel 1997; Dion and Huber 1996; Sinclair 1999). But this literature has largely ignored the importance of waivers in the legislative process. Our analysis begins to address this gap by utilizing waivers to test theoretical claims that to this point have only been applied to the amendment portion of special rules. We find waivers are a source of conflict on special rules independent of the restrictive characteristics of the rule. We also find waiver protections can be explained by some of the same determinants of restrictive rules as claimed by informational, distributive, and partisan theories, but that no single explanation covers all types of waivers. In general, we infer from these results that procedural choice is shaped not only by amendment restrictions imposed by special rules, but also by features of waivers that determine which standing rules of the House may apply. By not incorporating waivers in our studies of floor procedure, we miss an important source of evidence for distinguishing between theories of legislative organization.
Informational, distributive and partisan theories offer competing interpretations of the role of restrictive rules in the US House. Empirical tests in this literature focus almost exclusively on the amendment restriction portion of special rules, treating open rules as friendly and restrictive rules as unfriendly to the minority party or chamber as a whole. Oddly, however, there is a significant amount of conflict - partisan conflict in particular - connected with open rules. This suggests that the structuring of amendment possibilities cannot be the only relevant feature of special rules and that an exclusive focus on amendment restrictions might cause analysts to underestimate the importance of partisanship in the rules process. We find that partisan conflict on special rules results not only from the restrictiveness of the rule, but also from specific types of waivers (especially blanket waivers and waivers protecting legislative language in appropriations bills) and other under-studied features of special rules (such as time caps and pre-print requirements).
Assessing presidential influence in Congress requires accurate measures of legislators' baseline preferences. Common strategies extract preferences from roll-call votes. One approach selects votes most likely to reveal uncorrupted, sincere preferences, and the other, NOMINATE, derives summaries of members' positions from large samples of votes. This article finds that NOMINATE scores do not accurately recover the relative positions of members in simulated legislatures. Errors increase with the number of policy dimensions and do not depend on agenda control or on vote trading. However useful NOMINATE is for summarizing voting patterns, this article cautions against this approach to measuring legislators' preferences.
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