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Abstract:
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My research project is a break from the current trend in the literature that focuses on the conflict associated with roll call voting—party polarization and institutional friction . I am interested in determining how policy characteristics of roll call decisions can affect legislators' vote choices . Bills not only differ according to issue content—agricultural policy versus social welfare policy—but also according to how ambiguous they are—a collection of disparate issues versus one specific issue . Using a dataset of House roll calls from 1985 -2004 and the Policy Agendas Project content coding scheme , I show that variation in both policy area and policy ambiguity of a given bill is associated with variation in the accuracy of ideology in predicting roll call vote choice . |