Examining the Influences over Roll Call Voting in Multiple Issue Areas: A Comparative US State Analysis

Abstract

Examinations of roll call voting have found that issue salience affects the influences over roll call voting in different issue areas. However, it is unclear whether these findings can be extended to legislatures generally as studies have focused only on the US congress or one US state legislature. This article examines the influences over roll call voting in 15 issue areas in five legislative chambers in four US states. The results show the influences over roll call voting vary based on issue salience, but chamber variations suggest that features in the political environment, such as party competition and the resources available to legislators, are just as important in understanding the factors that influence roll call voting.

Keywords:

• roll call voting
• issue areas

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Doug Roscoe, John Frendreis, Alan Gitelson and John Pelissero for their helpful comments.

Notes

Codes were also included for energy, science and technology, federal government, and miscellaneous resolutions but so few bills fell into these categories in these states (usually less than two in each state) that scores were not developed in these areas.

Each of the coders was allowed to assign two issue area codes to a bill: a primary code and a secondary code. The coders were defined as having agreed when the primary code of each coder was the same or when the primary code of one coder matched the secondary code of the other coder. However, only the primary codes were utilised in this analysis. In other words, each bill was assigned to one and only one category.

There are a number of reasons why this is the case but they cannot be explored here due to space constraints. As an example though, in Florida, amendments need not be germane to the bill, so there is a tendency for representatives to attach proposals to bills that will definitely pass in order to ensure the success of their proposal (Dye 1998, p. 108). Given that amendments were not included here, this is part of the reason why there are more than ten votes in only five issue areas in this state.

The question was open-ended in that it did not give legislators a list of choices, but it did contain three lines for legislators to list the three most important issues. Thus, the percentages add to more than 100 per cent as legislators could mention up to three issues. There was a precipitous drop-off in frequency in mention from these issues to the next most commonly mentioned. The next two top issues were jobs (mentioned by 17.9 per cent) and the role of government (mentioned by 16.5 per cent). So there seems to be a clear distinction between the salient issues listed above and other issues in the minds of legislators.

While it would be ideal to have data on the salience of issues to constituents in each district, such data are unavailable at the state legislative district level. Thus, these measures are the best possible proxies for constituency opinion. The fact that they both support the same conclusions about issue salience lends support to the validity of such measures.

These models are available for viewing at: http://works.bepress.com/shannon_jenkins/.

An examination of additional issue areas where there were fewer than ten votes in the Florida House (results not presented here) reveals that ideology tends to dominate voting in most issue areas in this legislative chamber. Thus, this result does not appear to be due to the issue areas chosen for analysis here.

Similar concerns might be raised about the reliance on a single point in time; however, other research has suggested that the interesting variations in state legislatures are from state to state rather than from year to year, at least in a short-term time frame (Jenkins 2006). Nonetheless, these results do show that the influences over roll call voting are not the same in the different issue areas in these chambers as the previous research suggested.