Dispositions, constituencies, and cross-pressures: Modeling roll-call voting on the North American Free Trade Agreement in the US House

The vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created significant cross-pressures for members of the U.S. House of Representatives. African-Americans and Latinos, two groups that are often in agreement, staked out different positions on this legislation, and President Clinton joined Republicans in supporting NAFTA over the opposition of organized labor, liberals, and the Democratic leadership. We explore the degree to which constituency, institutional, and dispositional. forces worked at cross-purposes in shaping House members' roll-call behavior on this legislation. We find that votes on NAFTA were affected by members' ideological orientations, general presidential support, representation of a Western state, Latino and African-American constituency strength, urbanization, unemployment, electoral margin, and an interaction between Latino constituency strength and electoral margin. Surprisingly, we find only modest impacts of constituency union membership and the Perot vote on roll-call voting on NAFTA.