Examining the Robustness of Ideological Voting

Evidence from the Confederate House of Representatives

Bibliographic Data

ID6230176
AuthorsJ A Jenkins (0000-0001-7426-3370, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume44
Issue4
Pages811
Publication date2000-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0092-5853 • E-ISSN: 1540-5907
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2669283
OpenAlexW2066263234
LanguageEN
Citations received32
References cited31

A majority of work on Congressional voting behavior finds that members of Congress establish ideological positions and maintain them throughout the entirety of their careers, regardless of how their career aspirations, political positions, or underlying constituencies change. Based on this evidence, Poole (1998) concludes that members of Congress die in their ideological boots. I examine the robustness of the thesis more closely, using vote-scaling techniques and roll-call voting data from a different American legislative system: the Congress of the Confederate States of America. Initial results run contrary to the ideological-boots thesis, as I uncover low levels of cross-system stability among members who moved from the U.S. House to the Confederate House. Examining further, I argue that high levels of ideological stability follow from a strong party system being in place to structure voting, which has traditionally been the case in the two-party U.S. House but was not the case in the partyless Confederate House. This result aside, I do find a moderate but increasing level of ideological stability among members of the Confederate House in a session-by-session analysis, which is robust to a serious shock (Federal invasion) to the constituency-representative linkage underlying the electoral connection. This latter finding suggests that as long as there are electoral incentives associated with ideological labels, then ideologies will develop regardless of party structure. ecent work in the field of Congressional voting behavior suggests that members of Congress (MCs) die in their ideological boots. That is, according to Poole (1998, 3), based upon the roll-call voting record, once elected to Congress, members adopt an ideological position and maintain that position throughout their careers-once a liberal or a conservative or a moderate, always a liberal or a conservative or a moderate. This finding applies not only to members of the contemporary Congress, but MCs from bygone eras as well, as Poole and Rosenthal (1997) find high levels of individual-level ideological stability across nearly all of United States Congressional history. Moreover, additional evidence suggests that members of Congress remain ideologically consistent even in the face of changing personal or electoral conditions: members' voting records remain essentially the same, regardless of whether they plan to retire (Lott 1987; Van Beek 1991; Lott and Bronars 1993; Poole and Rosenthal 1997), plan to run for a higher office (Hibbing 1986; Poole and Romer 1993), serve in a higher office (Grofman, Griffin, and Berry 1995; Poole and Rosenthal 1997), or have their districts redrawn (Poole and Romer 1993; Poole 1998). This article examines the thesis further to assess whether it is truly a general finding. Rather than examine voting behavior in the U.S. Congress, however, I focus on voting behavior in a heretofore forgotten institution in American history: the Congress of the Confederate States of America. I contend that the Confederate Congress is a suitable forum to explore the robustness of the ideological-boots thesis, because it provides two unique extensions to the study of individual-level ideological stability that cannot be pursued in a study of the U.S. Congress. First, a significant number of individuals who served in the Confederate House had

Aside · Economics · House of Representatives · Ideology · Incentive · Law and economics · Legislature · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Roll call · Sociology · Voting · Voting behavior · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Media Influence and Politics · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies

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