This research explores the extent to which personal attributes influenced the voting behavior of the members of Congress on the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 (DOMA). The author tested the relationship between legislators’ personal attributes and the way legislators voted on the law by using the Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATIVE scores for the 104 Congress of the United States on the statistical method of Chi-squared (χ2), and the Phi (φ) coefficient of correlation. The results suggested that even though the strength of the correlation is moderate or weak, the personal attributes matter; since factors such as political party, ideology, and gender are statistically significant for legislators when they have to vote for or against politics that defend and preserve the traditional marriage.
