One way in which parties in the U.S. House of Representatives might affect legislative outcomes is if they pressure some of their members into voting the party line, when those members would prefer not to. How well do traditional measures of party voting, such as the Rice index of party...

In a standard spatial model of Parliamentary roll call voting with quadratic utility, the ligislator votes for the policy outcome corresponding to Yea if her utility for Yea is greater than her utility for Nay. The voting decision of the legislator is modeled as a function of the difference...