Introduction

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3162/036298009789869682
• Published date: 01 November 2009
• Author: Gerhard Loewenberg
• Date: 01 November 2009

451Introduction

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXIV, 4, November 2009 451

Introduction

In the November 2008 issue of this Quarterly, we published a

series of articles dealing with a central problem of legislative research:

how best to measure the policy preferences of individual legislators

and of legislative parties. Two additional articles in this series appeared

in the February 2009 issue and two nal articles appear in this issue.

It is important to recognize that while identifying legislators’ “ideal

points” may appear to be a measurement problem, in fact it raises

methodological issues in the broad epistemological sense of that term,

issues of the relationship between measures and the concepts of theo-

retical interest. To understand what a legislature does (and why it does

it) we need to know the policy preferences of its members. Is the most

widely used measure of those preferences—their roll-call vote—a valid

indicator of those preferences? Previous articles in this series have

grappled with that question. The two concluding pieces in this issue do

so again, in this case comparing two of the most widely used statistical

models for identifying legislators’ locations in an abstract policy space

from their voting record.

The importance of the issue of measuring legislators’ positions

is well illustrated by the lead article in this issue. Eric Schickler and

Kathryn Pearson reassess the party cartel theory, which asserts that the

majority party controls the agenda of the U.S. House of Representa-

tives through its ability to control the decisions of the House Rules

Committee. Schickler and Pearson challenge this conclusion. They do

so by questioning the use of roll-call votes as evidence of the Rules

Committee’s inuence on the oor of the House. For that measure they

substitute data on the content of bills, transcripts of committee hearings,

members’ statements, and newspaper coverage. Using data from 1937

to 1952, they assess the extent to which the Rules Committee reported

bills to the oor that challenged the policies of the majority party. During

those years, the Democrats had a majority in Congress but a conservative

coalition appeared to have great inuence. The authors show that the