The Determinants of Congressional Voting on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

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.