Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: A Roll Call Analysis of the California Assembly

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Doctoral Dissertation student produces a computerized database of all roll-call votes cast in the California Assembly since 1849. Using a Poole-Rosenthal method of analyzing the ideological composition of the US has greatly increased the understanding of the Congress. By employing roll data from every Congressional session and assuming that each member's ideological position is relatively fixed from one session to the next, Poole and Rosenthal are able to locate all members of Congress throughout its history in a common ideological space. Given this cross-temporally comparable space, they are able to address questions of how, for example, partisan divergence, regional alignment, and the dimensionality of political conflict have changed over time. While the leverage of this approach clearly extends beyond the US Congress, there are few such applications in the literature. In this grant, the student brings the power of Poole and Rosenthal's method to the study of party and ideology within California's state legislature. The dissertation will unravel the dynamics of partisanship in the California legislature and, in particular, how these dynamics are affected by electoral institutions, such as rules governing primary elections, which have varied considerably across California's history. In this case, the data generated are used to measure the degree of partisan alignment and polarization through California's history. Application of these data to other central questions of legislative scholarship such as the effects of term limits, legislative professionalization, or the presence of the ballot initiative come quickly to mind. The researcher has already completed collection of these data for 1957-1958, 1967-1968, 1977-1978, 1987-1988, and 1993-2001 sessions. This is a dataset that will be used by other scholars interested in these questions.