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A Research Note on the Impact of Interparty Competition on Congressional Voting in a Competitive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

David W. Brady
David W. Brady*
Affiliation:
University of Houston
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Abstract

In the modern House of Representatives party competition for seats is not strongly correlated with or predictive of party voting behavior. The most plausible explanation for this weak relationship is that less than 20 per cent of House seats are competitive from one census to the next. In this study the Hasbrouck-Jones Fluidity Index was applied to House elections in the 1890—1900 period, and almost 50 per cent of House seats in this era were found to have been competitive at that time.

From the 1892—1900 period the 55th and 56th U.S. Houses were selected for analysis. A varimax factor analysis was run on the party votes in these Congresses, and the resultant factor scores formed a unidimensional measure of the number of times a member voted with a party majority. A multiple regression analysis was run, with these party support scores used as the dependent variable and with party competition and occupational composition of the district used as the independent variables. The results showed that in both houses party competition was strongly correlated with and predictive of party support scores. The same analysis on the 89th House yielded much weaker correlations and showed little predictive ability.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , March 1973 , pp. 153 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1973

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References

1 MacRae, Duncan Jr., “The Relation Between Roll Call Votes and Constituencies in the Massachusetts House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 46 (1952), 1046–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sorauf, Frank J., Party and Representation, (New York: Atherton Press, 1963), pp. 133–144Google Scholar, Chap. 6; Flinn, Thomas A., “Party Responsibility in the States: Some Causal Factors,” American Political Science Review, 58 (1964), 60–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dye, Thomas R., “A Comparison of Constituency Influence in the Upper and Lower Chambers of a State Legislature,” Western Political Quarterly, 14 (1961), 473–480CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Pesonen, Pertti, “Close and Safe State Elections in Massachusetts,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 7 (1963), 54–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grumm, John G., “The Systematic Analysis of Blocs in the Study of Legislative Behavior,” Western Political Quarterly, 18 (1965), 350–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 See Jewell, Malcolm and Patterson, Samuel, The Legislative Process in the United States (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 438–439Google Scholar, for a discussion of the mixed results.

3 Jones, Charles O., “The Role of the Campaign in Congressional Politics,” in Jennings, M. Kent and Zeigler, L. Harmon, The Electoral Process (New Jersey, 1966), 21–41Google Scholar; and Weinbaum, Marvin G. and Judd, Dennis R., “In Search of a Mandated Congress,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 14 (1970), 276–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Jones, Charles O., “Inter-Party Competition for Congressional Seats,” Western Political Quarterly, 17 (1964), 461–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasbrouck, Paul, Party Government in the House of Representatives (New York: Macmillan, 1927)Google Scholar, Chap. 9. Jones used a modified version of Hasbrouck's Fluidity Index.

5 MacRae, Duncan Jr., Dimensions of Congressional Voting (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1958), p. 286.Google Scholar

6 Shannon, W. Wayne, Party, Constituency and Congressional Voting (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1968), pp. 42–46.Google Scholar

7 The number of roll calls analyzed in each House were: 109 roll calls in the 55th House and 92 in the 56th House.

8 Ranney, Austin and Kendall, Wilmoore, “The American Party Systems,” American Political Science Review, 48 (1954), 477–485CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pfeiffer, David G., “The Measurement of Inter-Party Competition and Systematic Stability,” American Political Science Review, 61 (1967), 457–167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The Pfeiffer index is used in the regression equation because it results in a seven value index whereas the Hasbrouck-Jones index yields a smaller number of categories, e.g., change/no change; and the smaller the number of values that a variable takes the more inflated the magnitude of the correlation coefficients. Thus the Pfeiffer scale is used because it is more appropriate for the multiple regression technique. Further, the Hasbrouck-Jones index was regressed against the party voting scores and the correlations were found to be about .10 higher than those reported in Tables 4 and 5.

9 The scale is:

Percentage of Total Work Force Industrial

0 to 10 coded 1

11 to 25 coded 2

26 to 40 coded 3

41 to 55 coded 4

56 to 70 coded 5

71 to 86 coded 6

87 to 100 coded 7

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