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Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

James M. Snyder Jr.  and
Michael M. Ting
James M. Snyder Jr.
Affiliation:
Departments of Political Science and Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139. e-mail: [email protected]
Michael M. Ting
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and SIPA, Columbia University, Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, Harvard University, 420 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10027. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individual legislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators' preferences are private information, and they have two means of communicating their preferences to voters. First, they each have a “party label” that credibly identifies an interval within which their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votes may convey additional information about their preferences. Each legislator must therefore tailor his or her votes to his or her district in order to forestall a reelection challenge from the opposing party. In equilibrium, nonsincere voting records will occur mostly in moderate districts, where extreme incumbents are vulnerable to challenges from relatively centrist candidates. In those districts, the most extreme legislators may even choose to vote sincerely and retire rather than compile a moderate voting record. Thus, both roll call scores and candidate types will be responsive to district type. An empirical test of shifts in roll call scores of retiring House members in moderate districts confirms these findings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 11 , Issue 4: Special Issue on Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models , Autumn 2003 , pp. 419 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association 2003 

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