Models of Legislative Voting

IN RECENT YEARS various specialists in legislative behavior have found themselves troubled by what they have considered to be a deficiency in theory-building in the field. After an extended review of the literature on Congress, for instance, Robert Peabody argues, "The critical need is for theory at several levels for, quite clearly, in congressional research the generation of data has proceeded much more rapidly than the accumulation of theory."' While it is not clear that "the" theory of legislative behavior is on the horizon, scholars have recently developed a number of models of legislative voting which promise substantial theoretical payoff. These models are relevant not only to the specific case of legislative voting itself, but also potentially to legislative decision-making more broadly conceived and to governmental decision-making in general. These models have largely stood in splendid isolation, each supposedly representing a fairly complete accounting of legislative vot-