Abstract

This paper updates Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. Congress is based largely on an analysis of the first 100 Congresses and is devoted to showing that important episodes in American political and economic history can be better understood by supplementing or reinterpreting more traditional analyses with the basic space theory of ideology. Ideology was measured by D-NOMINATE scores. Here we update some of our findings using new estimations that are complete through the end of the 105th Congress. We find that the trend to polarization and unidimensionality that we identified in Congress has continued unabated through the 105th Congress. The shift to Republican control after the 1994 elections is part of this trend and does not represent a sharp break in roll call voting behavior. Comparison of NOMINATE results for the United States to those for other parliaments indicates the ideological character of roll call voting in Congress.