Archive of State Roll Call Collection

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Research on American legislative behavior and policy making has focused primarily on Congress with much less attention to the politics of the state legislatures. This is a missed opportunity because the states legislatures display variation in many of the key factors that legislative theories predict should influence the operations of these bodies and how responsive they are to their electorates. The greatest obstacle to this comparative analysis has been a simple lack of data. Roll call records are frequently used to measure legislators' policy positions as well as the cohesion and strength of legislative parties within legislatures. But, unlike Congress, the records of roll call votes in the states have not been in any easily available format for scientific analyses. This data shortage is addressed with the development of a methodology of computer-assisted extraction of roll call data from the variety of sources and formats in which this information is found in the states. This approach to data generation is dramatically more efficient and less error-prone than traditional methods of hand coding and manual data entry. The methodology has been well-developed so that a complete set of competitive roll calls and matching presidential vote totals for legislative districts were compiled for the 1999-2000 sessions, and subsequently, for the post-redistricting legislative sessions of 2003-2004. In addition the investigator has collected all of the state legislative roll call votes available from state legislative web sites. This includes roll calls for 74 of the chambers covering periods from six to 22 years. The longitudinal data are particularly important for assessing the effects of changes in party control, the character of the larger party systems which has been polarizing, and changes in legislative rules and procedures. The data from 1999-2000 have been fully processed are and available for general use. This grant supports the processing of the remaining data sets, including extraction of the key information and the formatting the data so that it is suitable for statistical analyses and distribution to the research community. The availability of this new data resource will provide the raw materials for testing existing legislative theory on a much larger set of cases and for developing new research questions that derive from a comparative perspective. The data sets will facilitate researchers' efforts to develop new knowledge about the workings of America's legislatures. Beyond the basic research value of these data, the project has the potential for broader impacts by informing public understanding of the operations of the full set of American legislatures including the impacts of reforms such as term limits, electoral change, divided government, and redistricting as well as the effects of electoral change such as party control of the legislatures and governorships.