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Objectives. Conventional wisdom about the link between campaign contributions & roll call votes is that contributions rarely matter because groups tend to give to like-minded legislators. This meta-analysis examines the conventional wisdom by analyzing published research on this topic. Methods. More than 30 studies are pooled to produce more than 350 individual tests of the contributions-roll call link. Extending meta-regression (Stanley & Jarrell, 1989), a logit meta-analysis is conducted to summarize the literature & assess the importance of various modeling choices. Results. We find that some, but not all, model specifications have an impact on whether significant results are present. Models that control for friendly giving by including a measure of legislators' ideology & that include more than one contributions variable are less likely to produce significant results. Conclusions. After considering the impact of model choice on study results, we conclude that one-third of roll call votes exhibit the impact of campaign contributions. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 21 References. Adapted from the source document.

A number of studies suggest that the gender of a legislator affects his or her congressional ideology. We argue that these studies may have produced misleading results because of insufficient controls for constituency influences. To better account for constituency effects, we use a longitudinal research design based on electoral turnover, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. We apply ordinary least squares regression to data from the 103d, 104th, and 105th Houses of Representatives and estimate the effect of gender turnover on changes in DW‐NOMINATE roll‐call voting scores. We find that, when we sufficiently control for both party and constituency influences, gender is not a determinant of the liberalness of a representative's roll‐call voting behavior.

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization.

In a nationwide survey Carey, Niemi, Powell, and Moncrief (2006) found that term-limited state legislators feel less constrained by their constituencies. I use direct measures of legislative activity to examine how this 'Burkean shift' in attitudes is manifested in roll-call behavior. With a new dataset consisting of all competitive state legislative roll calls for the 1999-2000 sessions and a new measure of district constituency preferences, I examine three hypotheses: that term-limited legislators are less representative of their constituents, are more polarized, and participate less in roll-call voting. I find no evidence that term-limited legislators are any less representative, and no differences in levels of party polarization appear associated with the term limits reform. I find that the impact of term limits on roll-call voting is manifested in decreased legislative effort, but this effect only appears in the more demanding legislatures. The results are consistent with the sorting model in which elections are reasonably efficient at selecting leaders whose preferences align with those of their districts, but the prospect of re-election has little role in achieving representation of constituents' ideological preferences. Adapted from the source document.

Recent studies have documented that parties influence legislative behavior. But such studies have been unable to distinguish between party voting stemming from ideological agreement and true party influence, as most lack independent measures of legislator ideology and have not been tested at the U.S. state level. Using survey data to control for legislator ideology, this analysis looks at how and under what conditions parties influence voting in three sessions of five state legislatures. The results suggest party influence on voting in the states is partly due to the fact that legislators have similar beliefs and represent similar people. Nonetheless, parties exert an independent influence on roll call voting due to state legislators' desire for party resources and their desire to create a positive brand name for the party. Furthermore, there are numerous circumstances under which parties exert this influence. Adapted from the source document.

Objectives. Conventional wisdom about the link between campaign contributions and roll call votes is that contributions rarely matter because groups tend to give to like‐minded legislators. This meta‐analysis examines the conventional wisdom by analyzing published research on this topic.Methods. More than 30 studies are pooled to produce more than 350 individual tests of the contributions‐roll call link. Extending meta‐regression (Stanley and Jarrell, 1989), a logit meta‐analysis is conducted to summarize the literature and assess the importance of various modeling choices.Results. We find that some, but not all, model specifications have an impact on whether significant results are present. Models that control for friendly giving by including a measure of legislators' ideology and that include more than one contributions variable are less likely to produce significant results.Conclusions. After considering the impact of model choice on study results, we conclude that one‐third of roll call votes exhibit the impact of campaign contributions.

Objectives. Conventional wisdom about the link between campaign contributions and roll call votes is that contributions rarely matter because groups tend to give to like-minded legislators. This meta-analysis examines the conventional wisdom by analyzing published research on this topic. Methods. More than 30 studies are pooled to produce more than 350 individual tests of the contributions-roll call link. Extending meta-regression (Stanley and Jarrell, 1989), a logit meta-analysis is conducted to summarize the literature and assess the importance of various modeling choices. Results. We find that some, but not all, model specifications have an impact on whether significant results are present. Models that control for friendly giving by including a measure of legislators' ideology and that include more than one contributions variable are less likely to produce significant results. Conclusions. After considering the impact of model choice on study results, we conclude that one-third of roll call votes exhibit the impact of campaign contributions. (Original abstract)

This note extends Melissa P. Collie's "Universalism and the Parties in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1921–80," American Journal of Political Science 32, 4 (November 1988): 865–883. Detecting a strongly negative correlation between the time series of universalism and partisanship in roll call votes for the 67th through 96th U.S. Houses, Collie concluded that consensus and partisanship are alternative, rival means of organizing legislative activity. If robust, this finding ought not to be time- or chamber-specific: it should be in evidence over the whole (partisan) histories of both House and Senate, session by session. Moreover, the inverse relationship should persist under alternative operationalizations of both partisanship and universalism. Using several measures of partisanship and universalism, mostly based on roll call votes tabulated for sessions of Congress, we reassess this relationship for the 43rd through 105th Congresses. Collie's core finding persists for both chambers over the longer time span provided that one uses her measures. But results are weaker when sessions of Congress rather than Congresses are used as units of observation, and alternative operationalizations of partisanship and universalism do not strongly replicate the original finding.