Introduction

• Date: 01 February 2015
• Published date: 01 February 2015
• Author: Peverill Squire
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12062

Introduction

To open the f‌irst issue of Volume 40 of this Quarterly, it seemed

appropriate to take stock of the major trends in legislative research in the

last four decades and to assess the challenges that face legislative

research today. Sarah Binder, who served as editor for manuscripts on US

congressional research from 2010 to 2013, reviews the state of legislative

research in the article which opens this issue, based on a talk she gave to

mark the 40th anniversary celebration of the founding of this journal. She

reviews the principal theoretical approaches to the study of legislatures

ref‌lected in the pages of the Quarterly, discusses the development of

research methodologies in this f‌ield, and raises the question of the con-

tribution that legislative research can make to the challenges which the

institution faces. While Binder’s assessment is oriented to the work on

the US Congress, it applies equally to work on US state legislatures and

to legislatures outside the United States. A decade ago Kenneth Shepsle

(2002) wrote that “despite the exceptionalism of its history and institu-

tional practices, American politics has served the wider political science

community by forging scientif‌ic tools and providing a laboratory in

which they are tested, perfected, and prepared for export.” The pages of

the Quarterly over 40 years show a growing number of articles on

legislatures other than the US Congress. The work that these articles

report ref‌lects concepts and methodologies that are the result of both

exports from US political science and imports from the work of scholars

in the profession all over the world. Indeed, the hope of the founders of

this Quarterly, that it would promote comparative legislative research,

has been increasingly realized.

The f‌irst research article in this issue examines one of the funda-

mental research questions that legislative scholars address, how lawmak-

ers decide their vote on the measures before them. It is also one of the

hardest questions to examine because it requires information on the

internal workings of each legislator’s mind. Janet Box-Steffensmeier,

Josh M. Ryan, and Anand Edward Sokhey devise a clever approach to

this question by studying cue-taking in US Senate f‌loor voting. They

examine the US Senate because f‌loor voting is done in such a manner

that the authors can determine the order in which members voted and

how they voted. What happens during a vote is that each senator walks

toward the front of the chamber, catches the clerk’s attention, and then

indicates his or her voting preference either verbally or by hand gesture.

The clerk then verbally announces the name of the senator and the

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 1, February 2015 1

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12062

© 2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa