A New Approach to Modeling Political Change

Wellesley College Working Paper No. 97-07

Posted: 13 Jan 1998

Date Written: August 1997

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to investigate whether legislators vote in two distinct blocs as suggested by the U.S. political system and whether these voting patterns can be explained by economic variables. The paper exploits U.S. Roll-Call votes from a rich unbalanced panel data set of 540 legislators over 104 Congressional sessions and Presidents since the Korean War. The paper employs a variant of the Hamilton Regime-Switching Model (1989) to uncover three major patterns in the data. There appear to be two distinct voting blocs closely related though not identical to the two-party system. Shifts in these blocs are most frequent in Presidential elections and are less frequent in the Senate and House consistent with forefathers' vision in the Constitution. Finally, since World War II, economic variables do not seem to influence the shift, implying that these political shocks are exogenous. However, over longer horizons, recessions do tend to force political change in the legislature.

JEL Classification: H1,H5,H8

Suggested Citation

Blomberg, S. Brock, A New Approach to Modeling Political Change (August 1997). Wellesley College Working Paper No. 97-07, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=49054

S. Brock Blomberg (Contact Author)

Ursinus College ( email )

Collegeville, PA 19426-2562
United States

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