Legislative Representation in a Single-Member versus Multiple-Member District System: The Arizona State Legislature
| Autor: | Brian E. Russell, Christopher A. Cooper, Lilliard E. Richardson |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: |
Sociology and Political Science
media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences State legislature Legislature House of Representatives Public administration 0506 political science Representation (politics) Empirical research State (polity) Voting Political science 0502 economics and business 050602 political science & public administration 050207 economics Legislator media_common |
| Zdroj: | Political Research Quarterly. 57:337-344 |
| ISSN: | 1938-274X 1065-9129 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/106591290405700214 |
| Popis: | Most research on legislative decisionmaking has focused on legislatures with single-member district systems, but much less is known about legislatures with multiple-member district systems. This study compares a multiple-member legislative chamber, the Arizona House of Representatives, to a single-member system, the Arizona Senate. First, we examine the ideological preferences across the two chambers, and we find that the House system produces more ideological extremism than the Senate. Second, we test a model of legislative decisionmaking that employs constituency variables, legislator attributes and ideology. We find that constituency characteristics are significant in the Senate, but in the House ideology dominates. The combination of ideological extremism and its greater importance in decisionmaking in the House suggests powerful effects of the multiple-member district system. H ow do legislators represent the interests of the people? A multitude of empirical studies have attempted to determine which factors explain voting patterns of members of Congress. Evidence has pointed to economic interests of the district (McArthur and Marks 1988; Richardson and Munger 1990), ideological preferences of the constituency (Kau and Rubin 1982; Peltzman 1984), and legislator ideology (Kalt and Zupan 1984; Poole and Rosenthal 1991). The empirical results of such models have provided a portrait of representation that is complex and varied across issue areas and time. One limitation of these models, however, has been that most of the research has been on Congress, and fewer empirical studies of voting have been conducted on state legislative voting (see Jewell 1981; Moncrief, Thompson, and Cassie 1996). The need for empirical analysis of state legislative voting patterns exists on several dimensions. First, it is important to see if the results found in congressional studies extend to other legislatures. Second, state legislatures have experienced tremendous changes over the last few decades in terms of professionalism (King 2000) and power vis-a-vis governors in the budgetary process (Rosenthal 1998). Because these changes have not been uniform and states started at different points initially, these features provide tremendous opportunities for assessing representation in a host of legislative environments. Finally, state legislatures provide a rich variety of institutions that allow for a comparative assessment of the impact of different legislative features. For example, state legislatures offer contrasts to Congress on several possible dimensions: term limits in many states, a unicameral legislature in Nebraska, constitutional session limitations in most states, and multiple-member districts versus single-member districts in a few states. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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