Reference no: EM134039075

Question

In this part of the assignment, we will analyze the determinants of roll-call voting behavior for members of the U.S. Congress. In particular, we are going to focus on the degree to which representatives cast roll call votes in support of feminist issues as our outcome. Measuring support for feminist issues (or any set of issues) is a perilous exercise, so we will employ the standard strategy in the literature and use an interest group score as our measure. Interest groups often construct a legislative score to provide information to their membership on how supportive each legislator is of the particular issue of interest. These groups construct their roll-call scores by selecting the most important votes in the Congress (from their perspective) and then calculating the percentage of these important votes in which the legislator votes on the side of the issue favored by the group. Because these groups have a clear position and stake in an issue, the idea is that they can reasonably select the most important roll-call votes and the appropriate position on these votes. While these measures are imperfect, they are likely the best available measure of legislative support for a given issue. For this exercise,