An Analysis of Voting and Legislative Behavior
Treat campaign promises and roll-call votes as operants you can shape, then use that power to protect ABA funding.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Scibak (2025) treats voting and law-making as plain operant behavior. He asks: what reinforcers keep a senator talking on the floor? What schedules shape a citizen pulling the lever?
The paper is a call-to-action, not an experiment. It maps Skinner’s verbal operants—mand, tact, intraverbal—onto campaign slogans, donor calls, and roll-call votes.
What they found
No new data are shown. Instead, the author shows that political acts fit the three-term contingency: antecedent speech, behavior of voting, consequence of re-election or donor cash.
When you see the contingency, you can redesign it. Change the reinforcers and you change the laws that fund our field.
How this fits with other research
Gilmore et al. (2022) already used the same lens on racist police talk. They extend Scibak’s frame from Capitol Hill to the jailhouse, giving you scripts to reshape intraverbals like “offender profile” in your own agency.
Hake (1982) asked for basic human operant work on social talk forty years ago. Scibak answers by picking the richest social case—legislatures—and says “go measure these reinforcers now.”
Becker et al. (2022) push the same logic into aphasia rehab. Both papers say behavior analysts ignore a high-impact arena; together they form a roadmap—start with voting rights, end with healthcare funding for our clients.
Why it matters
If a bill that cuts Medicaid passes, your clients lose hours. Scibak gives you the blueprint to lobby like a behavior analyst: identify the reinforcers driving the swing vote, deliver a bigger one, and watch the bill die. You already write behavior plans; now write one for your city council.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Despite the scope and breadth of applied behavior analysis (ABA) over its 60-year history, little attention has been directed toward the formulation and implementation of public policy. This lack of attention is notable because Skinner (1953) posited that government is probably the most obvious agency engaged in the control of human behavior. Although behavioral strategies have been employed to address policy issues, most studies examined small groups in circumscribed settings. Glenn’s (1988) conceptualization of the metacontingency provided a framework for examining public policymaking, with culturo-behavioral science rapidly emerging as a means to further advance our understanding of the complex interactions involved in social and cultural systems (Glenn, 2003; Malott & Glenn, 2019) and the continuing evolution of public policy. This article focuses on voting as an operant behavior and the interlocking behavioral contingencies (IBCs) at play when citizens vote at the polls and lawmakers are voting on potential legislation. Because virtually all legislative bodies have specific protocols regarding everything from legislative drafting to floor debate, the majority of their activity involves rule-governed behavior. In contrast, the votes which a legislator casts, like those of the general public in an election, are contingency-shaped behaviors. One key difference between the vote cast by a private citizen and a legislator are the external consequences that can be imposed following the vote by legislative or governmental leaders. Despite having only a small number of behavior analysts serving in legislatures, recent successes surrounding licensure and mandated insurance coverage for behavior analysis have resulted in a greater awareness by legislators and policymakers of the need and value of such services, suggesting that this is an opportune time for behavior analysts to become more involved and shape public policy.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40617-023-00875-0