Abstract

This article builds on Matthews and Stimson's (1975) study of legislative cuetaking, analyzing the extent to which legislators sitting next to each other influence each others' voting behavior. Data come from three decades of roll call votes in the California Assembly, a chamber in which each member is paired with a deskmate. By comparing deskmate pairs with nondeskmate pairs, I find that legislators vote identically to their deskmates on a sizeable subset of roll calls. This deskmate effect appears to remain strong even as a rival influence — legislative partisanship — increases in strength.