Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: Since 1944, United States financing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been appropriated and approved in Congress by roll-call vote. If voting to increase funds to the IMF is viewed as an observable signal of “support” for the IMF, these votes provide a historical record of legislative support for the IMF in the United States. I analyze roll-call voting on IMF financing from 1944 to 2009 at both the aggregate (congressional) and the micro (legislator) levels. At the aggregate level, I show that support for the IMF has fallen over time in the House of Representatives but not in the Senate. In the micro-analysis, I use a “natural experiment” to establish that this intercameral difference is the result of the Senate’s larger and more heterogeneous constituencies, as opposed to other modeled and unmodeled factors. I also find that legislator support for the IMF is shaped strongly by ideology: regardless of chamber, left-wing legislators are as much as 31 percentage points more likely to support the IMF than right-wing legislators. Yet controlling for ideology, senators are more likely to support the IMF than representatives, and representatives are more sensitive to constituency pressures than senators. I attribute these differences to chamber-specific rules governing the size of constituencies.
Author: J. Lawrence Broz
Institution: University of California San Diego
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,990
OpenAlex ID: W2103357782