Policy proposals begin life in the legislative arena as high-dimensional ideas that are reduced to a single evaluative dimension by the time they are decided on the legislative floor. While roll-call decisions in Congress are largely unidimensional, little is known about the dimensional structure of policy outputs. Do policy outputs reflect a high-dimensional environment or a low-dimensional structure similar to the legislative floor? This article proposes. a theory of policy outputs and investigates this question by examining the dimensional structure of policy outputs. The results indicate that outputs are fundamentally multidimensional.
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