Part II
Measuring Partisanship
This section uses a series of measures of partisanship to determine the
role of party in roll call voting in the House. Starting with Lowell’s century
old “party votes” technique, and following up with the measures
introduced by Rice in the 1920s (and still in common use), we can see
the shifts in partisanship over time in a very general way. The final figures
show various interpretations of the Phi (? ) coefficient, which is analagous
to a Pearson Product Moment (correlation – r). For each individual roll
call vote, Phi tells us the correlation between party and the vote outcome.
The final figure is an OLS regression with Phi as the dependant vairable,
and the various Clausen topic orderings as dependants.