ABSTRACT
This chapter examines political agenda change in the context of the Alabama state senate. Senate sessions meeting in 1961, 1971, 1981, and 1991 are analyzed with regard to the content of the legislative agenda and the roll-call voting behavior of legislators in light of the characteristics of the constituents they represent. The roll-call analysis is based on the procedure developed by Clausen and used by others to examine issue dimensions in the United States Congress. The Clausen procedure first assigns roll calls to broad issue categories or domains. A "social welfare" domain involves bills aimed at a "direct intercession of the government on behalf of the individual" and includes education, minimum wages and working conditions, and traditional "relief benefits. A third domain, "government management of the economy," deals with less direct interventions in the economy. The dominant factor in the state business domain exemplifies both the similarity and the change of a thirty-year interval.
