Constituency Characteristics and Legislative Preferences

Keith Krehbiel

Public Choice, 1993, vol. 76, issue 1-2, 37 pages

Abstract: An important concern for testing any theory of legislative politics is how to measure legislative preferences. No existing measures are immune to criticism, so sound advice should be based on a balanced assessment of various types of measures. This study focuses on the ability of constituency characteristics to predict Senate roll call votes. Even in the best possible case, constituency-characteristic measures are shown to be deficient both absolutely and relative to supposedly crude, vote-based measures which as ADA ratings. The implication is that constituency-characteristic measures are inappropriate as direct measures of legislative preferences. However, the possibility remains that for some applications they are useful indirect measures, e.g., as right hand side variables that covary with legislative behavior of interest. Copyright 1993 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1993
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:76:y:1993:i:1-2:p:21-37

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

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 ().