A major concern of political theorists has been the definition of the proper role of legislators in relation to their constituencies. Yet relatively little analysis has been made of the uniformities of behavior that actually prevail in these relations. Such uniformities, if they could be found, would bear directly on the theory of the party system, on speculation about the nature of representative government, and on the feasibility of proposals for a reordering of party practices.It has been shown that the tendencies of Congressmen to vote with their party or to cross party lines are associated with the similarity or dissimilarity between party policy and presumed interest of constituency. One aim of this study is to test the applicability of this proposition to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, by examination of the relation between roll-call votes and constituency characteristics. The evidence indicates that a similar relation exists in this body, and has been present consistently throughout the last two decades.
Since the theory of games was first made widely available, with application to economic behavior, its use has been suggested in many other areas, from the global to the individual. Several correspondences between game theory and certain aspects of political process have been noted.The contribution of game theory to substantive knowledge in the empirical sciences, however, has been modest; Luce and Raiffa judge that its impact has been greater in applied mathematics. The area of political behavior—despite the apparent applicability of the notion of conflict of interest—is similarly lacking in studies, although a few notable exceptions exist.
In the past seventy years, lasting reorientations of the national electorate have taken place in two periods, centering about the presidential elections of 1896 and 1918. Most other presidential elections have involved relatively uniform swings of states or counties toward one party or the other; Louis Bean summarized this phenomenon in his chapter title, “As Your State Goes, So Goes the Nation.” But the occasions when this uniform swing does not occur are of special interest, because if the reorientations persist they can mark the injection of new issues into national and state politics for a generation. Lubell noted the importance of the “Al Smith revolution” which preceded the “Roosevelt revolution”; and Key, naming these phenomena “critical elections,” went on to show that Bryan's candidacy in 1896 marked an earlier major reorientation of the electorate. He defined a critical election as one in which “the depth and intensity of electoral involvement are high, in which more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community, and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed.”
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