IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecopol/v2y1990i1p59-82.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Dimensions, Transactions Costs And Coalitions In Legislative Voting

Author

Listed:
  • Kenneth Koford

Abstract

Dimensional studies of Congressional voting have found a single dominant “ideological” dimension, while regression estimates find that constituency variables and party are dominant. Koford (1989b) recalibrated the dimensional studies, and found that several dimensions are important. This study reviews those findings, and then considers additional reasons why dimensional studies might understate the number of dimensions. It then examines the regression estimates for biases that overstate the number of dimensions. Overall, fewer dimensions are found than seem consistent with the wide variety of constituents' preferences on issues. A model is developed in which the transactions costs of building coalitions reduces the number of dimensions visible on roll‐call votes below the underlying dimensionality of preferences in the issue space. When legislative parties build internal coalitions to pass and defeat bills, voting on randomly drawn bills has a single party‐oriented dimension. Natural ideological dimensions are reinforced when parties write bills and logroll along natural lines of cohesion. Numerical examples suggest that these effects could be important, and suggest lines for empirical investigation of the underlying issue space.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenneth Koford, 1990. "Dimensions, Transactions Costs And Coalitions In Legislative Voting," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 2(1), pages 59-82, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:2:y:1990:i:1:p:59-82
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0343.1990.tb00023.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0343.1990.tb00023.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1468-0343.1990.tb00023.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Enelow,James M. & Hinich,Melvin J., 1984. "The Spatial Theory of Voting," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521275156, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ronald N. Johnson & Gary D. Libecap, 2003. "Transaction Costs and Coalition Stability under Majority Rule," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 41(2), pages 193-207, April.
    2. Kenneth Koford, 1994. "What Can We Learn About Congressional Politics From Dimensional Studies Of Roll‐Call Voting?," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 6(2), pages 173-186, July.
    3. Keith T. Poole & Howard Rosenthal, 1994. "Dimensional Simplification And Economic Theories Of Legislative Behavior," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 6(2), pages 163-172, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Luigi Curini & Paolo Martelli, 2009. "Electoral Systems and Government Stability: A Simulation of 2006 Italian Policy Space," Czech Economic Review, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, vol. 3(3), pages 305-322, October.
    2. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/eu4vqp9ompqllr09iepsg269m is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Jonathan Pool, 1992. "The Multilingual Election Problem," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 4(1), pages 31-52, January.
    4. Daniela Giannetti & Itai Sened, 2004. "Party Competition and Coalition Formation," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(4), pages 483-515, October.
    5. Witterblad, Mikael, 2008. "Essays on Redistribution and Local Public Expenditures," Umeå Economic Studies 731, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    6. Torsten J. Selck, 2005. "Improving the Explanatory Power of Bargaining Models," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 17(3), pages 371-375, July.
    7. Sadiraj, V. & Tuinstra, J. & Winden, F. van, 2005. "On the size of the winning set in the presence of interest groups," CeNDEF Working Papers 05-08, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance.
    8. Eijffinger, Sylvester & Mahieu, Ronald & Raes, Louis, 2018. "Inferring hawks and doves from voting records," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 107-120.
    9. A. Kamakura, Wagner & Afonso Mazzon, Jose & De Bruyn, Arnaud, 2006. "Modeling voter choice to predict the final outcome of two-stage elections," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 689-706.
    10. Thomas Bräuninger, 2007. "Stability in Spatial Voting Games with Restricted Preference Maximizing," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 19(2), pages 173-191, April.
    11. Tanner, Thomas Cole, 1994. "The spatial theory of elections: an analysis of voters' predictive dimensions and recovery of the underlying issue space," ISU General Staff Papers 1994010108000018174, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    12. Stefano Camatarri & Francesco Zucchini, 2019. "Government coalitions and Eurosceptic voting in the 2014 European Parliament elections," European Union Politics, , vol. 20(3), pages 425-446, September.
    13. Michel Le Breton & John A. Weymark, 2002. "Social choice with analytic preferences," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(3), pages 637-657.
    14. Tovey, Craig A., 2010. "The instability of instability of centered distributions," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 53-73, January.
    15. Grégoire Rota Graziosi, 2004. "La fragmentation politique, une revue de la littérature," Revue Française d'Économie, Programme National Persée, vol. 18(4), pages 193-223.
    16. Daniel Finke & Stefanie Bailer, 2019. "Crisis bargaining in the European Union: Formal rules or market pressure?," European Union Politics, , vol. 20(1), pages 109-133, March.
    17. Melvin J. Hinich & Michael C. Munger, 1992. "A Spatial Theory of Ideology," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 4(1), pages 5-30, January.
    18. Stratmann, Thomas, 1996. "How Reelection Constituencies Matter: Evidence from Political Action Committees' Contributions and Congressional Voting," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 39(2), pages 603-635, October.
    19. Tolotti, Marco & Yepez, Jorge, 2020. "Hotelling-Bertrand duopoly competition under firm-specific network effects," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 105-128.
    20. Thomas Schwartz, 2011. "One-dimensionality and stability in legislative voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 148(1), pages 197-214, July.
    21. Witterblad, Mikael, 2008. "The Demand for Local Public Services in Sweden," Umeå Economic Studies 730, Umeå University, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:2:y:1990:i:1:p:59-82. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0954-1985 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.