U.s. Congressman Decision-making Behavior Analysis And China To Vote

The U.S congressional decision-making is a complicated process, and every decision of the congress is made by the single congressmen. This article will analyze the voting behavior of the individual congressmen by using the methods of rational choice, and try to find out how do legislators make decisions and what kinds actors affect their decision-making.First of all, like other decision-makers, congressmen must make a large volume of complex decisions, while constrained by limits on time and cognitive capacity to do so without extensive study of each issue. With all the constrains and limits to the congressmen, the rational behavior of legislators is not perfect rationality, but bounded rationality. So they need some shortcut to cut their information costs and simplify their choices. The procedure of the legislators decision behavior is a sequential process. When there is no conflict in the floor, the legislators simply vote with the environment, and this is what exactly Kington calls "the consensus". If there is some conflict among the congressman's relevant actors, he then proceeds to consider the content of the bills. They will classify the bills into some policy area, in each policy area, they will have the relatively stable cue-takers to make their final decisions. Then statistical methods is used to reveal how the party affiliate, policy area and cue-givers affects the voting behavior of the legislators.The this paper analyzes how the decision model applies to the issues related to China. And two cases is studied, one is the congress resolutions concerning ideology and the other is about the export of high-performance computers. At last, I draw a three conclusion: the voting behavior of legislators is rational; the anti-china resolutions passed in congress don't necessarily mean that there have been a strong anti-china force in U.S congress; the rational behavior of the individual congressmen may also lead to irrational collective results.