Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Political Science, 2010.
This dissertation analyzes how preferences, parties, and constituencies jointly
impact legislative policy making. It consists of three essays, each addressing
this issue in different ways. In the first, I develop a new statistical model
to formalize Barbara Sinclair’s (2002) observation that legislators’ decisions
are a weighted average of multiple sources of influence. Applying this approach
to the U.S. Senate since 1995 shows both its general usefulness and
generates a number of important substantive results. For example, one
key finding is that Republican moderates are much more sensitive to electoral
and partisan pressures, reducing the weight they put on their own
personal ideologies, than Republican extremists or Democrats of all ideological
types. My second essay analyzes how external conditions affecting
constituencies impact legislative behavior in a non-partisan environment.
Specifically, I present a theory of how legislative district occupation led to
observed preference change in the non-partisan Confederate Congress. I
find that the crisis imparted by the occupation of legislators’ districts led
them to shift their behavior in favor of strengthening the Confederate government.
My final essay changes gears and examines legislative behavior
from the perspective of voters. Since voters are often unable to locate
their legislators on an ideological scale, I present a statistical method that
allows scholars to better understand the mechanisms behind voters’ decisions
whether to place legislators on a seven-point scale. The results suggest
that informational, racial, and ethnic factors are influential in terms of
saliency, but that education is a powerful predictor for decisiveness.
