Dismantling the south-west coalition: further evidence of distributive politics in preemption legislation

William J. Byrd () and John Dove
Additional contact information
William J. Byrd: Troy University

Economics of Governance, 2021, vol. 22, issue 3, No 1, 193-214

Abstract: Abstract The factors influencing legislative voting behavior have often been studied. This is especially true regarding antebellum federal preemption legislation. Several conjectures have been posited and evaluated within the literature, with historical analysis suggesting geographic coalitions playing a dominant role. However, more recent empirical research based on a distributive theory of politics casts doubt on this hypothesis (Gailmard and Jenkins Gailmard and Jenkins, Public Choice 175:259–275, 2018). This paper adds to this debate by extending the empirical analysis to include several other potential factors relevant to the decision-making process. These include the ideological disposition of a given legislator, voter preferences, and special interest influences. Our econometric results support the distributive theory model and add additional nuance as well. Specifically, we find that a legislator’s ideological disposition and constituent preferences are a strong indicator of voting behavior, as is geographic location (though not in the manner suggested by historical analysis).

Keywords: Preemption; Land Distribution; Land Policy; Federalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 H11 H77 N41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10101-021-00257-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:22:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s10101-021-00257-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10101/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10101-021-00257-8

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Governance is currently edited by Amihai Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger

More articles in Economics of Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().