The Amendment in Legislative Strategy: Sophisticated Voting in the U.S. Congress

T HE THEORY OF "sophisticated" voting addresses the problem of how an individual can make the best use of his votes. Circumstances may arise when it is advantageous to vote contrary to one's own preferences. When votes are taken on several issues, an individual may be better off after the last vote if he does not vote in accordance with his preferences on every issue. A sophisticated strategy is a plan telling him how his votes can best be used when others are doing likewise. Initially developed by Farquharson in his Theory of Voting,' sophisticated voting has received theoretical attention from McKelvey and Niemi,2 Enelow and Koehler,3 and others. This attention has focused on legislative voting games, which are characterized by a finite sequence of two-alternative issues. However, little testing of the theory has yet been done. This paper is motivated by the need to determine the utility of the theory for predicting and explaining real legislative voting. To be specific, this paper will examine two simple amendment strategies and show