A study of the direction and degree of aggregate behavioral change in the House of Representatives from 1957 through 1974. The behavior of interest is the House members' liberalism as expressed on selected roll call votes that have been indexed for liberalism by two independent publications. The analysis accounts for the potential instrumentation problem in the liberalism indices by showing that the average liberalism of a group of members serving throughout the period provides a more reliable baseline against which to measure change than do the measuring instruments. The major findings are that, relative to the baseline group: (1) the average behavior of the House shows a marked trend in the liberal direction, (2) the most abrupt liberalism changes from one time to the next are associated with large scale partisan turnover, and (3) the general liberalism trend is a result of greater liberalism among, generally, each successive freshman group. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-07, Section: A, page: 2722. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1977.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75879 |
| Contributors | MCDONALD, MICHAEL DENNIS., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 178 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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