Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal
d-nominate after 10 Years:
A Comparative Update to Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXVI:5-29

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.

  Return to LSQ home page