An Axiomatic Model of Voting Bodies

Abstract

The act of voting in legislative and judicial bodies is one of the most widespread and valuable sources of information available to political analysts. When individuals make structured choices within some known institutional constraints, there is opportunity for the generation of data concerning how issues are collectively defined within an institution, the relative position of each actor with regard to every other actor, and the identification of blocs of actors which are more or less persistent from one issue to another over time. With proper techniques of analysis, we should be able not only to generalize about behavior within a given voting body but also to make general statements about the voting process. Cumulative studies of voting can be undertaken, however, only on the basis of some paradigm of the voting process—that is, some consensus on how voting as an act of political commitment is to be viewed. Such a paradigm not only should provide a viewpoint for the study of voting but should also suggest an orientation to the more general political phenomenon of which voting is an example—that is, actors making mutually exclusive choices in response to a series of questions, issues, candidates, etc. That such an agreed-upon viewpoint—not to mention a model that gives the viewpoint a precise focus—does not exist is obvious from the uses which have been made of voting data. Despite the ubiquity of such data and the many different kinds of analyses that have been performed on them, there is no model available that logically interrelates (1) systemic characteristics of voting bodies, (2) individual characteristics of their members, and (3) relational characteristics between pairs of members in such a way as to yield operational measures of voting behavior that are comparative in nature.