The Impact of Party on Voting Behavior in a Nonpartisan Legislature

Abstract

The Nebraska nonpartisan legislature serves as a control setting for testing several hypotheses about the impact of party and constituency on voting behavior in legislative bodies. Specifically, in light of the data obtained from a setting where party identification is present but party leadership and organization are absent, the following hypotheses are examined: that political parties are important in structuring voting behavior because of the influence of party leaders and organization; that party is important because party identification is a surrogate for sets of beliefs and attitudes that distinguish members of one party from another; or that party is important because party differences reflect different constituency bases of the party. In a roll-call analysis of five sessions utilizing Guttman-scaling and regression techniques, it was found that in the absence of party leadership and organization, voting is highly unstructured. Further, dimensions of voting that were found are largely unexplainable in terms of standard party and constituency variables. Thus, party identification and constituency influence appear to be insufficient cues for the organization of legislative voting behavior, in the absence of party leadership.