Recent Developments in Analytical Models of Voting in the U. S. Congress

This paper surveys recent developments in analytical models of roll-call voting in the U.S. Congress. Two controversies are analyzed in the paper: the one over the number of evaluative dimensions that underlie congressional voting and the other over the relative importance of the legislator's ideology and the objective economic interests of the constituency. The framework for the analysis is a spatial theory of voting, which embodies Philip Converse's theory of belief systems.