Understanding the Timing of Cue-Giving and Cue-Taking in the United States Senate
Scholars have long been interested in understanding how members of Congress make voting decisions, for this process is at the core of representative democracy. Existing literature investigating the nature of Congressional cue-taking identifies several sources that members of Congress may look to as a means of developing their own vote choices. Our work builds on this previous literature, adding temporal dynamics to the study of legislative cue-taking occurring on the floor of the U.S. Senate, while speaking to current work on co-sponsorship networks. Using an event history approach, our research investigates the timing of cues, thereby determining with greater accuracy the influence that potential cue-givers have on the vote choices of other members. Having coded C-SPAN coverage of voting during the 108th Congress, we implement a series of Cox proportional hazards models to analyze when specific Senate members voted on four different bills and their related amendments; bills were selected to achieve variance in terms of salience, partisanship, technicality, and policy breadth. We note that committee members serve as primary cue-givers, along with Senators from the same state; we also find evidence for the impact of party and floor vote tallies. In the end, we demonstrate the importance of (and leverage that may be gained by) including temporal measures in studies of congressional behavior
Year of publication: |
2010
|
---|---|
Authors: | Sokhey, Anand E. |
Other Persons: | Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. (contributor) |
Publisher: |
[2010]: [S.l.] : SSRN |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
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