Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T11:06:23.627Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Representation in U.S. Legislatures: The Acquisition and Analysis of U.S. State Legislative Roll-Call Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Jennifer Hayes Clark ,
Tracy Osborn ,
Jonathan Winburn  and
Gerald C. Wright
Jennifer Hayes Clark
Affiliation:
University of Houston
Tracy Osborn
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
Jonathan Winburn
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
Gerald C. Wright
Affiliation:
Indiana University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999–2000 and 2003–04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.

Type
The Pratical Researcher
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 356 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aldrich, John H., and Coleman Battista, James S.. 2002. “Conditional Party Government in the States.” American Journal of Political Science 46:164–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianco, William T., and Sened, Itai. 2005. “Uncovering Conditional Party Government: Reassessing the Evidence for Party Influence in Congress and State Legislatures.” American Political Science Review 99:361–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brady, David W., Cooper, Joseph, and Hurley, Patricia A.. 1979. “The Decline of Party in the U. S. House of Representatives, 1887–1968.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 4:381–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Gary W., and McCubbins, Mathew D.. 1991. “On the Decline of Party Voting in Congress.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 16:547–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Gary W., and McCubbins, Mathew D.. 1993. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Desposato, Scott W. 2005. “Correcting for Bias in Rice Cohesion Scores.” British Journal of Political Science 35:731–44.Google Scholar
Haspel, Moshe, Remington, Thomas, and Smith, Steven. 1998. “Electoral Institutions and Party Cohesion in the Russian Duma.” The Journal of Politics 60:417–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jewell, Malcolm E. 1955. “Party Voting in American State Legislatures.” American Political Science Review 49:773–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jewell, Malcolm E. 1982. “The Neglected World of State Politics.” The Journal of Politics 44:638–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacRae, Duncan Jr. 1952. “The Relation Between Roll Call Votes and Constituencies in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.” American Political Science Review 46:1046–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masket, Seth. 2007. “It Takes an Outsider: Extra-legislative Organization and Partisanship in the California Assembly, 1849–2006.” American Journal of Political Science 51:482–97.Google Scholar
McCarty, Nolan M., Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Moncrief, Gary, Thompson, Joel A., and Cassie, William. 1996. “Revisiting the State of U. S. State Legislative Research.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 21:301–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monroe, Burt L., Colaresi, Michael P., and Quinn, Kevin M.. 2008. “Fightin' Words: Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict.” Political Analysis 16:372–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgenstern, Scott. 2004. Patterns of Legislative Politics: Roll Call Voting in Latin America and the United States. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Poole, Keith T. 1998. “Estimating a Basic Space from a Set of Issue Scales.” American Journal of Political Science 42:954–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 1997. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rahat, Gideon. 2007. “Determinants of Party Cohesion: Evidence from the Case of the Israeli Parliament.” Parliamentary Affairs 60:279–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richman, Jesse. 2008. “Uncertainty and the Prevalence of Committee Outliers.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 33:323–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, Stewart. 1928. Quantitative Methods in Politics. New York, NY: Knopf.Google Scholar
Wright, Gerald C. 2007. “Do Term Limits Affect Legislative Roll Call Voting? Representation, Polarization, and Participation.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 7:256–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, Gerald C., and Clark, Jennifer Hayes. 2005. “Parties and Stability in Legislative Voting Coalitions in the American States,” Presented at the Annual American Political Science Association Conference, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Wright, Gerald C., and Schaffner, Brian F.. 2002. “The Influence of Party: Evidence from the State Legislatures.” American Political Science Review 96:367–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar