Ideology, Economic Interests, and Congressional Roll-Call Voting: Partisan Instability and Bank of the United States Legislation, 1811-1816

Jeffery A Jenkins and Marc Weidenmier

Public Choice, 1999, vol. 100, issue 3-4, 225-43

Abstract: We introduce a wrinkle into the study of Congressional roll-call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in American History: the Era of Good Feelings. During deviations from normal periods of two-party rule, the dominant model of voting behavior, the ideological model, loses precision in correctly classifying individual votes. We contend that a "pooled" voting model--comprised of both ideological and economic variables--performs better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods. When party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions, we believe the "electoral connection" is especially important, and, thus, economic-based constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice. To explore this belief, we focus on a particularly contentious issue--the rechartering of the Bank of the United States (BUS)--which was dealt with before and after a partisan decomposition occurred in the House. Using measures developed by Poole and Rosenthal (1985, 1997), we find that the vote on the First BUS in 1811, during a stable partisan period, is organized along ideological lines. By 1816, the two-party system collapsed, and we do not find the vote on the Second BUS to exhibit much ideological structure. Conversely, we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the Second BUS quite well, providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological classification. Copyright 1999 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1999
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