Abstract: Policy proposals begin life in the legislative arena as high-dimensional ideas that are reduced to a single evaluative dimension by the time they are decided on the legislative floor. While roll-call decisions in Congress are largely unidimensional, little is known about the dimensional structure of policy outputs. Do policy outputs reflect a high-dimensional environment or a low-dimensional structure similar to the legislative floor? This article proposes a theory of policy outputs and investigates this question by examining the dimensional structure of policy outputs. The results indicate that outputs are fundamentally multidimensional. Policy proposals are dynamic through the legislative process. Yet most research assumes that proposals are static, usually defined as they appear on the legislative floor. Most research classifies legislation based on floor behavior using general ideology measures, such as liberal or conservative, and uses this classification to predict the policy consequences of the votes. But do legislative outputs reflect this simple classification? Case-study research suggests that legislators have different reasons for supporting legislation at different stages of the legislative process. The decision to cosponsor a bill is different from the decision to support the bill in committee, or to support the bill on the floor, or to support the public law. Thus, policy proposals are dynamic: they have different underlying dimensional structures as they progress through the legislative process (Hall 1996; Jones 1994; King 1997). While the literature has thoroughly investigated the floor decision stage of legislation, little is known about the output stage, particularly how policy outputs are linked to floor decisions. We propose a theory of legislative outcome space that focuses on how low dimensional legislative decisions become high dimensional policy outputs. Specifically, the question we investigate in this study is, does the dimensional structure of policy outcomes reflect the low dimensions that characterize legislators' voting, or a higher multidimensional process? The first section of this article examines why dimensions and dimensional structures matter for the study of policy and political representation. Next, we propose a theory of legislative decisions and outcomes to explain how policy outcomes relate to floor decisions and activities. The third section describes the distributive program awards data and the NOMINATE method used to evaluate the theory. The fourth section presents the results of our analyses. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this paper for studies of congress, agenda setting and representation, and offers avenues for future study. POLITICAL THEORY AND POLICY DIMENSIONS Policy proposals are inherently multidimensional. Following Riker, we define a dimension as "a standard of measurement for relevant variable properties of alternatives and tastes" (1986: 143). In other words, any policy proposal has multiple evaluative characteristics that individually, or in concert, form the basis for decisions. Identifying the number of dimensions in a set of issues can be accomplished by examining coalitions of legislators' preferences or decisions across the issues. A unidimensional issue context creates consistent coalitions of legislators on each side of all issue proposals, with the coalitions changing only as moderate legislators move to either the conservative or liberal coalition depending on how the particular proposal favors either side. A multidimensional issue context creates different patterns of coalitions for different issues. The coalitions vary depending on which dimensions are most salient for particular issues. For example, economic issues may pit a coalition of legislators favoring redistributing wealth against a coalition that favors laissez-faire economic policies. A different coalition pattern would surround social issues, such as abortion, perhaps pitting social conservatives (some of who may favor laissez-faire economics while others favor economic redistribution) against a coalition of social liberals (whose members may also contain both economic liberals and economic conservatives). …

Abstract: We construct a time series of political party ideology, based on Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) NOMINATE scores, for the 1950-98 period. The results show that (1) party ideology has become increasingly more polarized over this period; and (2) that it is very sensitive to business cycle conditions. In particular, a worsening of economic conditions (e.g. higher inflation or unemployment) is associated with a decline of the relative difference in party ideology scores. Republicans tend to become "less conservative" relative to Democrats when either the unemployment or inflation rate increases. We obtain the same results using an equivalent time series based on ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores. That there is an important economic component in ADA and NOMINATE scores questions the ability to interpret these scores as proxies of legislator ideology. But the finding that political parties' platforms tend to converge during economic downturns is not inconsistent with the traditional Downsian-type approach of modeling party behavior.

Abstract: There has been some confusion over whether the name Oriolus steerii Sharpe, 1877, should be attached to the population of Basilan or the population of Negros of the Philippine oriole. Two separate descriptions appeared (Sharpe, 1877 a, b) and differed. A decision on which was the prior description was taken by Dickinson et al. (1991) and a fresh review of the facts shows that they were incorrect in selecting Basilan as the type locality of the nominate form. That decision was in contradiction to the approach taken by Greenway in Mayr & Greenway (1962). As there, the name must be assigned to the population of Negros. As a result, the population of Basilan must be called O. s. basilanicus Ogilvie- Grant, 1896, or if a broader species-concept is preferred O. xanthonotus basilanicus Ogilvie-Grant, 1896. The name nigrostriatus Bourns & Worcester, 1894, returns to the synonymy of nominate steerii. The specimen in Tring is designated as the lectotype of steerii Sharpe, 1877, because the Michigan specimen, from Isabela de Basilan, is not representative of the nominate population of steerii.

Abstract: Scholars of both the presidency and the Congress require an accurate measure of legislators' underlying preferences. Whether one is interested in explaining policy outcomes, the politics of congressional committees or parties, or bargaining between the White House and Congress, one must know the preferences of the relevant actors. We cannot say anything about presidential influence, then, without controlling for the other determinants of legislators' actions, such as personal preferences and ideology or concerns induced on them by constituents and interest groups. Some research on legislative-executive relations has focused on improving measures of the extent to which Congress supports bills favored by the president (e.g., Edwards 1985; Fleisher and Bond 1983). These studies use data typically derived from congressional voting, preferring to filter (or censor) the information they obtain by selecting the "most appropriate" type of votes for their analysis. As an alternative approach, Poole and Rosenthal (1985, 1987, 1997) have developed a new approach to recovering the positions of legislators (ideal points) and of proposals in a policy space.(1) This article evaluates Poole and Rosenthal's approach, called NOMINATE, by assessing the degree to which it makes accurate predictions about the positions of members. It concludes that despite important advantages, the NOMINATE techniques seem to generate significant errors in identifying the positions of members. Section two of this article describes the NOMINATE approach emphasizing its advantages and assumptions. In section three, we describe our testing procedures. Section four summarizes our results suggesting that NOMINATE makes some serious errors. The final section suggests that NOMINATE's problems are generic to a class of approaches, including the use of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores and most other voting scores. It also suggests two new approaches to analyzing member behavior to establish the baseline behavior necessary for judging presidential influence. NOMINATE in Practice Since their introduction to political scientists, NOMINATE scores have been used fairly regularly as measures of legislators' ideology. Using these scores has a number of advantages over previous approaches. First, unlike previous approaches, NOMINATE explicitly operationalizes a model of motivation. Its assumptions include (1) motivation consistent with the spatial model of voting, (2) the use of "error" information, and (3) the lack of agenda effects. Since they take the broadest set of data relating to legislator preferences--the complete set of roll-call votes from a Congress--NOMINATE scores provide a broad-based, non-time-specific measure of underlying legislator ideology. With NOMINATE, there is no need to specify in advance the coalition patterns or salient issues that structure summaries of voting behavior. With these data in hand, scholars could then arrange legislators in order of their ideology based on first-dimension NOMINATE scores and identify votes on which legislators appear to have abandoned their ideological predisposition.(2) Whether this departure is attributable to presidential intervention or something else obviously requires other controls, but such an endeavor would still be a major advance in understanding presidential-congressional relations and the nature of policy making in the federal government. Ordering legislators according to their ideology (or propensity to vote with one party or the other) could help identify a set of crucial moderates that one would expect the president to target on close votes. One could then use more refined statistical tests or perform descriptive analyses on this subset of legislators to ascertain the degree to which the president was able to influence their votes. Not only would this be more reliable than a case-by-case analysis of specific votes, it also would more accurately reflect the intuition that presidents might make long-term investments with certain moderate legislators rather than try to buy them off one vote at a time. …

Abstract: Ask people to nominate the companies they hold in highest regard and they will all volunteer a name and an opinion. Some will nominate a company because of a direct experience they have had with its products and services. Others will base their opinion on the returns they have earned from investing in the company's shares. Sum up these opinions from a representative segment of the general public, and you have a snapshot of the company's reputation.