Ideology, economic interests, and congressional roll-call voting: Partisaninstability and Bank of the United States legislation, 1811-1816

We introduce a wrinkle into the study of Congressional roll-call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in American History: the Era o f Good Feelings. During deviations from normal periods of two-party rule, t he dominant model of voting behavior, the ideological model, loses precisio n in correctly classifying individual votes. We contend that a "pooled'' vo ting model - comprised of both ideological and economic variables - perform s better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods. Wh en party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions, we believe th e "electoral connection'' is especially important, and, thus, economic-base d constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice. To explor e this belief, we focus on a particularly contentious issue - the recharter ing of the Bank of the United States (BUS) - which was dealt with before an d after a partisan decomposition occurred in the House. Using measures deve loped by Poole and Rosenthal (1985, 1997), we find that the vote on the Fir st BUS in 1811, during a stable partisan period, is organized along ideolog ical lines. By 1816, the two-party system collapsed, and we do not find the vote on the Second BUS to exhibit much ideological structure. Conversely, we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the Second BUS quite wel l, providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological cl assification.