Uncovering the Party Effect in the US Congress

Özet

Although there has been a voluminous literature on American foreign policy and its effect on severalregions, research on American domestic politics has been relatively scarce. Due to its significant impacton foreign policy formation, the Presidency received a lot of scholarly attention. This paper, on the otherhand, focuses on another important actor in American foreign and domestic policy: The United StatesCongress. In this respect, we specifically aim to contribute to the literature on American Congress whichaims to uncover the party effect on legislative behavior. Current studies on the topic usually rely on rollcallvotes. Although this method has been quite popular, recent studies indicate problems in terms ofmeasuring the true effect of the party. Hence, this study proposes an alternative method which has beenwidely used in the European Politics literature. The proposed methods involves using expert surveys todetermine the level of party effect.