The Jeffords switch and legislator rolls in the U.S. Senate

Chris Den Hartog () and Nathan Monroe ()

Public Choice, 2015, vol. 165, issue 1, 25-43

Abstract: On May 24, 2001 United States Senator James Jeffords announced that he was switching from Republican to independent and would vote with Democrats on organizational matters (i.e. votes deciding party membership and majority party status), effectively taking majority party control of the Senate from the Republicans and giving it to the Democrats. This created an unusually well controlled quasi-experimental opportunity for learning about the role of parties in the Senate—it held most important variables constant while one variable, majority status, changed. We use roll call data to evaluate the probability of individual members of each party being rolled on Senate final passage votes, before and after the switch. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom on the Senate, majority status is an important factor in Senate decision-making. Our results show that Republicans were more likely to be rolled after the switch than they had been before, and that Democrats were less likely to be rolled than they had been before. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: U.S. Senate; Congress; Parties; Jeffords; Natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-015-0289-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:165:y:2015:i:1:p:25-43

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-015-0289-0

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

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