Dispositions, Constituencies, and Cross-Pressures: Modeling Roll-Call Voting on the North American Free Trade Agreement in the U.S. House

Abstract

The vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created significant cross-pressures for members of the U.S. House of Representa tives. African-Americans and Latinos, two groups that are often in agree ment, staked out different positions on this legislation, and President Clinton joined Republicans in supporting NAFTA over the opposition of organized labor, liberals, and the Democratic leadership. We explore the degree to which constituency, institutional, and dispositional forces worked at cross- purposes in shaping House members' roll-call behavior on this legislation. We find that votes on NAFTA were affected by members' ideological orien tations, general presidential support, representation of a Western state, Latino and African-American constituency strength, urbanization, unem ployment, electoral margin, and an interaction between Latino constitu ency strength and electoral margin. Surprisingly, we find only modest impacts of constituency union membership and the Perot vote on roll-call voting on NAFTA.