Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to discover the determinants of Congressional voting
in the House on the two different versions the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of
2008, and to determine what caused Congressmen to switch their votes from the first bill
to the second. Using a Probit model and independent variables representing the personal,
this study finds that ideology, political contributions, “closeness” of the 2008 electoral
race, other personal and political characteristics of House members, and other
demographic characteristics of their home districts were important in determining the
vote; the forces driving vote switching were more difficult to ascertain.
