Search results

Recent applications of more elaborate quantitative methods (e.g., bloc cluster analysis and Guttman scale procedures) to legislative politics have sharply improved the ability of political scientists to specify significant dimensions of voting behavior. Party affiliation, constituency characteristics and cohesion within state delegations have been correlated with the congressional vote in a number of subject matter areas. Because of the masses of data to be handled, however, even the best of these studies have been limited in scope to a single year or to one Congress. This restriction has not prevented the authors of these works from demonstrating clearly the utility of their methodology, but it has limited correspondingly either the generality or the reliability of their conclusions. The present study, limited to the single issue of congressional voting on foreign aid, is an attempt to discover, by the application of quantitative methods to votes over longer time periods, how far the relationships previously suggested persist over time or are peculiar to the individual sessions in which they occur.

Much popular and scholarly writing abounds with references to blocs in the UN General Assembly, but there has been little systematic study of the actual patterns of group alignment in that body. This state of affairs may have resulted from the difficulties inherent in applying to international organization the methods used to analyze domestic legislative behavior. However, social scientists have recently developed some new techniques which may help to simplify this task and allow us to use quantitative procedures to study voting behavior in the General Assembly. This article will attempt to point out the difficulties encountered in analyzing bloc voting, and to indicate possible solutions, based on the use of quantitative techniques.

A revised and updated Congress text. A year on Capitol Hill in 1993 gave Congressional authority Leroy Rieselbach many examples with which to illustrate traditional topics such as rules, committees, and norms, as well as evolving issues such as the "year of the woman."