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40 Legis. Stud. Q. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/lgvessqy40 and id is 1 raw text is: - ® - °Comparative Legislative Le ' t g Studies Quarerly Oesearc Introduction To open the first issue of Volume 40 of this Quarterly, it seemed appropriate to take stock of the major trends in legislative research in the last four decades and to assess the challenges that face legislative research today. Sarah Binder, who served as editor for manuscripts on US congressional research from 2010 to 2013, reviews the state of legislative research in the article which opens this issue, based on a talk she gave to mark the 40th anniversary celebration of the founding of this journal. She reviews the principal theoretical approaches to the study of legislatures reflected in the pages of the Quarterly, discusses the development of research methodologies in this field, and raises the question of the con- tribution that legislative research can make to the challenges which the institution faces. While Binder's assessment is oriented to the work on the US Congress, it applies equally to work on US state legislatures and to legislatures outside the United States. A decade ago Kenneth Shepsle (2002) wrote that despite the exceptionalism of its history and institu- tional practices, American politics has served the wider political science community by forging scientific tools and providing a laboratory in which they are tested, perfected, and prepared for export. The pages of the Quarterly over 40 years show a growing number of articles on legislatures other than the US Congress. The work that these articles report reflects concepts and methodologies that are the result of both exports from US political science and imports from the work of scholars in the profession all over the world. Indeed, the hope of the founders of this Quarterly, that it would promote comparative legislative research, has been increasingly realized. The first research article in this issue examines one of the funda- mental research questions that legislative scholars address, how lawmak- ers decide their vote on the measures before them. It is also one of the hardest questions to examine because it requires information on the internal workings of each legislator's mind. Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Josh M. Ryan, and Anand Edward Sokhey devise a clever approach to this question by studying cue-taking in US Senate floor voting. They examine the US Senate because floor voting is done in such a manner that the authors can determine the order in which members voted and how they voted. What happens during a vote is that each senator walks toward the front of the chamber, catches the clerk's attention, and then indicates his or her voting preference either verbally or by hand gesture. The clerk then verbally announces the name of the senator and the LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 1, February 2015 1 DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12062 © 2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

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