The United States Congress and IMF financing, 1944–2009

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Since 1944, United States financing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been appropriated and approved in Congress by roll-call vote. If voting to increase funds to the IMF is viewed as an observable signal of “support” for the IMF, these votes provide a historical record of legislative support for the IMF in the United States. I analyze roll-call voting on IMF financing from 1944 to 2009 at both the aggregate (congressional) and the micro (legislator) levels. At the aggregate level, I show that support for the IMF has fallen over time in the House of Representatives but not in the Senate. In the micro-analysis, I use a “natural experiment” to establish that this intercameral difference is the result of the Senate’s larger and more heterogeneous constituencies, as opposed to other modeled and unmodeled factors. I also find that legislator support for the IMF is shaped strongly by ideology: regardless of chamber, left-wing legislators are as much as 31 percentage points more likely to support the IMF than right-wing legislators. Yet controlling for ideology, senators are more likely to support the IMF than representatives, and representatives are more sensitive to constituency pressures than senators. I attribute these differences to chamber-specific rules governing the size of constituencies.