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Hug discusses the problems of selection bias in roll call votes, offers empirical evidence that these biases may be considerable, and suggests a way to correct them. He first discusses the different ways in which roll call occurs in parliaments around the world. He then examines how the publication of votes, or not, leads to biases for two legislatures (1995-99, 1999-2003) of the Swiss lower house.

Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators' explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within-subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between-subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support—especially among people who disagree with the legislators' roll-call positions.

Do citizens hold their representatives accountable for policy decisions, as commonly assumed in theories of legislative politics? Previous research has failed to yield clear evidence on this question for two reasons: measurement error arising from noncomparable indicators of legislators' and constituents' preferences and potential simultaneity between constituents' beliefs about and approval of their representatives. Two new national surveys address the measurement problem directly by asking respondents how they would vote and how they think their representatives voted on key roll-call votes. Using the actual votes, we can, in turn, construct instrumental variables that correct for simultaneity. We find that the American electorate responds strongly to substantive representation. (1) Nearly all respondents have preferences over important bills before Congress. (2) Most constituents hold beliefs about their legislators' roll-call votes that reflect both the legislators' actual behavior and the parties' policy reputations. (3) Constituents use those beliefs to hold their legislators accountable.

Party cues provide citizens with low-cost information about their representatives' policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens' knowledge of their senators' positions on seven high-profile roll-call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics \"go bad,\" it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.

Do senators respond to the preferences of their state’s median voter or only to the preferences of their copartisans? We develop a method for estimating state-level public opinion broken down by partisanship so that scholars can distinguish between general and partisan responsiveness. We use this to study responsiveness in the context of Senate confirmation votes on Supreme Court nominees. We find that senators weight their partisan base far more heavily when casting such roll call votes. Indeed, when their state median voter and party median voter disagree, senators strongly favor the latter. This has significant implications for the study of legislative responsiveness and the role of public opinion in shaping the members of the nation’s highest court. The methodological approach we develop enables more nuanced analyses of public opinion and its effects, as well as more finely grained studies of legislative behavior and policy making.

Conventional multidimensional statistical models of roll call votes assume that legislators’ preferences are additively separable over dimensions. In this article, we introduce an item response model of roll call votes that allows for non-separability over latent dimensions. Conceptually, non-separability matters if outcomes over dimensions are related rather than independent in legislators’ decisions. Monte Carlo simulations highlight that separable item response models of roll call votes capture non-separability via correlated ideal points and higher salience of a primary dimension. We apply our model to the U.S. Senate and the European Parliament. In both settings, we find that legislators’ preferences over two basic dimensions are non-separable. These results have general implications for our understanding of legislative decision-making, as well as for empirical descriptions of preferences in legislatures.

For years, Republicans in Congress promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. The results of the 2016 elections put them in position to take action on the seminal domestic policy achievement of outgoing President Barack Obama. Repeal efforts faced many obstacles, including angry constituents crowding town hall style meetings with Republican members. Many members faced a stark choice between voting with their constituents or voting with their party. We use data on the number of town halls held by members to analyze whether members who heard from upset constituents were more likely to oppose the repeal effort. Next, we utilize data on House primaries and the 2018 general election to test whether the member’s position on repeal had any effects on the member’s electoral success. We find clear evidence that member’s voting behavior on the health care repeal had electoral effects in the 2018 general election.

Party-based theories of agenda power contend that when majority/plurality cartels exist, they control the outcomes in both the plenary and the committees. However, this conclusion is typically based on the use of dependent variables (roll-call votes and approval rates) that do not convey information about legislator behavior during the lawmaking process, so the mechanisms and the extent to which party leaders exercise their positive agenda power remain unclear. We propose to use vote switching by legislators between committee and floor voting as a measure of positive agenda power, and, to maximize potential variation in this power due to principal-agent conflict, we analyze evidence from a legislature in a federal multiparty system: the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. Our findings show that party leaders exercise their power over cartel-sponsored bills by eliciting favorable and demobilizing switches in order to build floor coalitions, but otherwise allow legislators with conflicting incentives to play around freely with their own agenda.

When constituent opinion and district conditions point in two different directions, which factor is most influential for representatives who face important legislative roll calls? To address this question, we combine four types of data for the period from 2000 to 2012: key congressional roll call votes, district-level survey data, objective measures of district conditions, and other district demographics. We show (1) that material conditions in a district have an effect on legislative behavior independent of constituents' opinions; (2) that opinions are not always a better predictor of lawmaker decisions, compared to conditions; and (3) that whether lawmakers tend to reflect constituent opinions or district conditions is a function of the demographic makeup of their districts.

Objective. Congressional votes are only recorded if a member formally requests a roll call vote, and that request is supported by one-fifth of those present. Many votes pass viva voce and are never recorded. We seek to examine changing patterns of unrecorded voting, analyze the causes of these changes, and consider the implications of these changes for congressional scholars. Methods. Using landmark legislation from the 39th (1865-1867) to the 104th Congress (1995-1996), we analyze whether bills receive a recorded or unrecorded final passage vote. Results. We find that while the likelihood that a landmark law receives a recorded final passage vote fluctuates over time, electoral pressures consistently influence members' decisions to record their votes. Conclusions. We argue that studies of Congress must account for the roll call generating process when analyzing roll call data.