TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lee,David S.
AU  - Moretti,Enrico
AU  - Butler,Matthew J.
TI  - Credibility and Policy Convergence: Evidence from U.S. House Roll Call Voting Records
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9315
PY  - 2002
Y2  - November 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9315
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9315.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Lee
Industrial Relations Section
Princeton University
Firestone Library A-16-J
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-9548
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: davidlee@princeton.edu

Enrico Moretti
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Economics
549 Evans Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/642 6649
Fax: 510/643 7042
E-Mail: moretti@econ.berkeley.edu
AB  - Traditional models of politician behavior predict complete or partial policy convergence, whereby electoral competition compels partisan politicians to choose positions more moderate than their most-preferred policies. Alternatively, if politicians cannot overcome the inability to make binding pre-commitments to policies, the expected result is complete policy divergence. By exploiting a regression discontinuity (RD) design inherent in the Congressional electoral system, this paper empirically tests the strong predictions of the complete divergence hypothesis against the alternative of partial convergence within the context of Representatives' roll call voting behavior in the U.S. House (1946-1994). The RD design implies that which party wins a district seat is quasi-randomly assigned among elections that turn out to be 'close'. We use this variation to examine if Representatives' roll call voting patterns do not respond to large exogenous changes in the probability of winning the election, the strong prediction of complete policy divergence. The evidence is more consistent with full divergence and less consistent with partial convergence, suggestive that the difficulty of establishing credible commitments to policies is an important real-world phenomenon.
ER  -