PATRICIA
A. HURLEY AND
BRINCK KERR
The Effects of Party Advantage on the Partisan Support
of New U.S. House Members
Legislative Studies Quarterly XXV:53-73
We argue that the partisan voting patterns of new
members of the House of Representatives are affected by national political
conditions. New members of a party advantaged by national forces should exhibit
distinctively partisan voting patterns, while new members of the disadvantaged
party should not. We use a comparative statics research design to examine eight
congresses with large numbers of new members that were also characterized by
different national forces. Multivariate OLS models of party support are used to
isolate the effects of first-term status while controlling for other factors
that might influence a member’s willingness to support his or her party. We
find that national forces have the expected general effect on the partisan
support of new members of the advantaged party, and that the size of that effect
varies with the particular character of the national forces.
Go to next
abstract
Return to
2000 Titles
Return to LSQ
home page