Resumen de How congressional leaders define loyalty: validating US House party voting scores with party leadership records
Measures of party unity are commonplace in the study of legislative voting, particularly in assessments of party influence. Scholars have employed a range of measures in studying loyalty and reward in the U.S. House, but all are proxies for the scores that House party leaders construct for their own processes. These loyalty scores have never been examined in empirical scholarship. Drawing on archived leadership records, I construct leader loyalty scores for House Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s based on leadership-selected key votes in each session. I show that the content of the leader lists was very sensitive to political context as the leadership responded to short-term challenges, but in the aggregate, leader loyalty scores are closely related over time to other indicators. As predictors of party rewards—in the form of committee posts and legislative success—the leadership’s measure provides some clearer evidence of reward, particularly in comparison to conventional party unity scores.
