Suchergebnisse

Comparative legislative research has contributed to an examination of the validity of roll‐call votes as measures of legislators' policy preferences. It has prompted an awareness of the influence of legislative structure on the composition of the voting record. Comparative research on members' ideal points has confronted the problems of selection effects, abstentions, the influence of the agenda setter, and the effect of party strategy. It has encouraged the search for alternate measures of members' preferences, including members' speech, cosponsorship, survey responses, and party manifestos. In the non‐American setting, ideal points have been regarded as group‐level, as well as individual‐level, variables. The game‐theoretic approach to the study of legislatures has led to the formulation of hypotheses relating legislative structure to members' ideal points.

Iattended my first American Political Science Association meeting in
1949. It was an exciting experience for me as a first-year graduate
student. I already venerated several established scholars in the
profession. Herman Finer and Carl Friedrich were the towering figures on
my intellectual landscape in comparative politics, my major field. In
American politics, in which I was a teaching assistant, Edward S. Corwin
and Carl B. Swisher were giants. And here they were, conspicuous in the
halls of the hotel, standing for hours, as I recall, each in his own
place, talking with groups of awe-struck students. The greats of the
profession were suddenly real people rather than simply names on books.
The APSA membership included a significant cadre of political leaders,
public figures, and well-known journalists. I was astonished to see
Senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas, Congressman Jacob Javits, Ralph
Bunche, who had just served as acting UN Mediator on Palestine, and Max
Lerner, a noted editorial writer and political theorist.