House Members Who Become Senators: Learning from a 'Natural Experiment' in Representation

by: Bernard Grofman, Robert Griffin, Gregory Berry

Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4. (1995), pp. 513-529.

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Abstract

Using AFL-CIO COPE roll-call voting scores, we show that the voting behavior of a House member who moves to the Senate is virtually indistinguishable from the voting behavior of both the mean House member and the incumbent senator from the new senator's state and party, and that the representative's voting behavior exhibits little systematic change after moving from the House. Moreover, what change there is cannot generally be interpreted as a move in the direction of the state's median voter. However, the directionality of our results is consistent with the Glazer and Robins (1985a) finding that when their constituencies change, Democrats are likely to be unresponsive to a change in constituency policy preferences unless it involves a shift to the left, while Republicans are likely to be unresponsive to a change in constituency policy preference unless it involves a shift to the right.

@article{citeulike:2547763, abstract = {Using AFL-CIO COPE roll-call voting scores, we show that the voting behavior of a House member who moves to the Senate is virtually indistinguishable from the voting behavior of both the mean House member and the incumbent senator from the new senator's state and party, and that the representative's voting behavior exhibits little systematic change after moving from the House. Moreover, what change there is cannot generally be interpreted as a move in the direction of the state's median voter. However, the directionality of our results is consistent with the Glazer and Robins (1985a) finding that when their constituencies change, Democrats are likely to be unresponsive to a change in constituency policy preferences unless it involves a shift to the left, while Republicans are likely to be unresponsive to a change in constituency policy preference unless it involves a shift to the right.}, author = {Grofman, Bernard and Griffin, Robert and Berry, Gregory }, citeulike-article-id = {2547763}, journal = {Legislative Studies Quarterly}, number = {4}, pages = {513--529}, posted-at = {2008-03-17 21:28:59}, priority = {1}, title = {House Members Who Become Senators: Learning from a 'Natural Experiment' in Representation}, url = {http://www.jstor.org/stable/440191}, volume = {20}, year = {1995} }

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TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2547763 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2547763 TI - House Members Who Become Senators: Learning from a 'Natural Experiment' in Representation JF - Legislative Studies Quarterly VL - 20 IS - 4 SP - 513 EP - 529 N2 - Using AFL-CIO COPE roll-call voting scores, we show that the voting behavior of a House member who moves to the Senate is virtually indistinguishable from the voting behavior of both the mean House member and the incumbent senator from the new senator's state and party, and that the representative's voting behavior exhibits little systematic change after moving from the House. Moreover, what change there is cannot generally be interpreted as a move in the direction of the state's median voter. However, the directionality of our results is consistent with the Glazer and Robins (1985a) finding that when their constituencies change, Democrats are likely to be unresponsive to a change in constituency policy preferences unless it involves a shift to the left, while Republicans are likely to be unresponsive to a change in constituency policy preference unless it involves a shift to the right. AU - Grofman, Bernard AU - Griffin, Robert AU - Berry, Gregory PY - 1995/// UR - http://www.jstor.org/stable/440191 ER -

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