Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that most congressional voting can be understood in terms of a low-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model to assess the importance of the two mechanisms that could contribute to the vote-predicting power of constituency variables: (i) constituency variables may predict where legislators fall along one or two dimensions in the vote-predicting spatial model and (ii) constituency variables may account for errors in the spatial model's predictions. The paper compares different methods of using a basic set of constituency variables to generate out-of-sample predictions for representatives' votes. The analysis covers a large number of recent House roll call votes, considering Democrats and Republicans separately and using Poole and Rosenthal's W-NOMINATE scores to measure legislators' locations in vote-predicting space. The results show that the predictive power of a basic set of constituency variables arises principally from its ability to predict representatives' locations in Poole and Rosenthal's space, not from its ability to explain errors in the predictions based on that space. This holds true to a remarkable extent, consistent with Poole and Rosenthal's argument that the influence of constituent interests occurs largely through logrolling mechanisms reflected in their spatial model. Copyright 2002 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Springer in its journal Public Choice.
Volume (Year): 112 (2002) Issue (Month): 1-2 (July) Pages: 31-53 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)