McCarty, Nolan <br/><br/>
The hunt for party discipline in congress 

 -  2001 
<br/><br/> We analyze party discipline in the House of Representatives between 1947 and 1998. The effects of party pressures can be represented in a spatial model by allowing each party to have its own cutting line on roll call votes. Adding a second cutting line makes, at best, a marginal improvement over the standard single-line model. Analysis of legislators who switch parties shows, however, that party discipline is manifest in the location of the legislator`s ideal point. In contrast to our approach, we find that the Snyder-groseclose method of estimating the influence of party discipline is biased toward exaggerating party effects