Recent publications indicate a continuing interest among political scientists in both the aggregating of discrete acts of legislative behavior into underlying dimensions and the empirical specification of voting blocs. The latter interest is served by the former, as aggregation often producs sets of dimensions useful for descriptive purposes, as well as aiding other types of analysis. Recent studies include MacRae's work on the House of Representatives using various forms of scaling, Alker's paper on voting patterns in the sixteenth General Assembly of the United Nations using factor analysis, and Grumm's work on the Kansas legislature using another form of factor analysis (Q-technique).
As these papers have described in some detail, the technique of factor analysis is particularly useful in producing empirical dimensions which are unitary, stable, exhaustive and parsimonious.