ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors argue that the presence of spatial voting is not inconsistent with voting on the basis of economic interests. Economic interests, while difficult to measure, arguably have an important impact on how issues are mapped into the space captured by NOMINATE. Moreover, members of Congress express these interests strategically, voting in logrolls, implicit or explicit, in which various interests are packaged. Although the authors recognize the role of economic interests, they also argue that these interests are neither the same as the interests of median or pivotal voter in each constituency nor the same as the interests of pivotal voters in each of the major parties in each constituency. Once the legislator's ideology in the basic space has been taken into account, there is evidence that points to modest degree of representative-voter influence on roll call voting behavior. The authors show the limits of this auxiliary role by comparing the success of economic models and NOMINATE.
