Social scientists are in the business of finding and explaining patterns of human behavior. Political scientists, who are concerned about how humans govern themselves, are no different. In the case of behavior of legislators observed in Congress and other parliamentary institutions, they frequently return to efforts to characterize and explain legislators’ general orientations to their jobs.
This endeavor begins with or yields a set of categories or archetypes. These categories come from both normative and empirical theories of politics. They are sometimes measured by asking legislators about how they view their jobs, the reasons for career choices they make, or influences on their voting behavior. In other studies, they are measured by generalizing from observations about their behavior—committee choices, voting behavior, use of staff and travel funds, bill sponsorship, floor speeches, and so on—and finding clusters of similar legislators.
Roles
In the 1950s and 1960s, studies of Congress borrowed from theories that emphasize that humans are social and their behavior is guided by the expectations of their society, family, or group. These expectations or prescriptions provide definitions for “roles”—behavior deemed appropriate for a person of a certain status and in certain circumstances. Because people who live in large, complex societies, roles can be defined in a variety of ways—often different ways in different groups or contexts. Two contexts—representative and legislative—warrant attention.
The most common way in which legislators’ roles can be defined is to focus on their job as representatives.[1] Edmund Burke, a political philosopher and member of the British Parliament in the late eighteenth century, is often remembered for his Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll, delivered in 1774. At issue was an effort to have the electorate approve instructions to its member of parliament on how to vote on an important issue. Burke opposed instructions and gave this reasoning (at a time when only men could vote or run for office):
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.…Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Burke distinguishes two views of representation. We might think that a representative’s job is to faithfully present (“re-present”) the views of his or her district or state in Congress and vote accordingly—that is, to serve as a delegate for his or her constituents. A delegate-legislator, however, does not have an easy job. His or her constituents often have conflicting or ambiguous views (or none at all) about the issues before Congress. Alternatively, a member of Congress might be considered a trustee—representing his or her constituents by exercising independent judgment in setting priorities and choosing policy positions. The trustee model is the “Burkean” model that is often referenced in popular discourse.
The hybrid style is usually labeled the “politico.” Many legislators constituency opinion may be their guide on some issues, perhaps the issues that are most salient in their home districts or states, while their personal interests and views guide their activity on other issues, perhaps as a result of their ability to educate or persuade constituents about the best policy. A politico shifts the relevant audience—constituencies, himself or herself—from one political context to another.
Additional legislative roles are connected to statuses within Congress. Political scientist Richard Fenno observed in the 1960s that members of the House Committee on Appropriations held a strong identity as members of the committee and recognized certain expectations—defining roles—for how a committee member ought to behave.[2] Collectively, the roles held by members defined a larger “social system” of the committee. The wide acceptance and synchronous nature of the roles on the committee made the committee well “integrated,” to use the term Fenno borrowed from social system theorists.
Given how frequently these representational roles of legislators are discussed, it is remarkable that we have virtually no useful data on legislators’ perceptions of their representational roles. Part of the problem is the difficulty of conducting systematic interviews with members of Congress. The legislative roles that Fenno and others identify are largely inferences from more loosely structured interviews with legislators.
Goals
In this context, Fenno is notable for another reason. He gave up the emphasis on roles, social system, and integration as soon as he moved to studying other committees. Here is his rationale for doing so, tucked into a footnote:
All committees are not pre-eminently social systems. All committees do not have an easily differentiable set of roles... In comparative perspective, the member contribution seems both large and distinctive.... The resulting conceptual framework is, therefore, somewhat more individualistic than the previous one.... This explains why-despite the fact that one will not find “adaptation” or “integration” or “roles” mentioned in my book-my earlier description of the two Appropriations Committees can easily be accommodated within this framework.[3]
Fenno shifted theoretical gears. Where he previously viewed behavior as guided by prescriptive roles of a social system, he now considered behavior to reflect strategies chosen in pursuit of personal political goals. Patterns in legislators’ goals may appear and so there may be patterns in strategies or behavior—or behavioral strategies, as political scientists often call them. The behavior, rather than being primarily social and driven by role prescriptions, was primarily instrumental and rational. Goals, in combination with resources and circumstances, explained behavior.
Fenno’s 1973 book on congressional committees, Congressmen in Committees, and David Mayhew’s 1974 book, Congress: The Electoral Connection, reflected an emerging set of rational-choice theories about political behavior, including spatial theories, which are introduced in Note 13. Fenno’s interviews with legislators led him to identify three goals that, to varying degrees in the committees he studied, motivated legislators’ choice of committees and activities as committee members: reelection, good public policy, and power within the House. Mayhew posited that reelection is the proximate goal of nearly all legislators and accounts for much of their behavior, including how they organize the House in committees and parties.
It is fair to say that instrumental theories have generated a much broader range of viable explanations of legislators’ behavior than social systems or role theory did. There surely are two important reasons for this. Perhaps most obvious, professional politicians, it is no surprise, attempt to be rationale in making choices about their legislative activities and a generally able to articulate their reasoning. In addition, the logic of instrumental action more readily yields well-defined predictions than role-based theory.
Roles and goals have an interesting relationship. We might think that the reelection goal and the delegate role dictate the same behavior; in fact, we might hypothesize that a legislator driven to get reelection will rationalize his or her behavior as being guided by constituents’ policy expectations. Similarly, a legislator driven by personal policy commitments may argue that he or she is obligated to use his or her best judgment about the public interest when making choices in the legislative arena. The fit of personal power to the role of politico may seem like a good one, too, although that is more of stretch. But the point is clear: Smart observers devised nearly parallel sets of categories from different theoretical perspectives.
Legislative Styles
Political scientists, along with everyday observers, have long noted that some legislators are “work horses,” while others are “show horses.”[4] The terms capture two types of legislators—a legislator dedicated to legislative work and a legislator seeking publicity. The distinction may or may not be useful, but it represents an effort to identify general patterns of behavior, or ideal types, that characterize legislators’ behavior to one degree or another. In the case of work horses and show horses, there may be career objectives or other factors behind the tendencies to be one or the other. For now, the important point is that styles of legislative behavior have been a common way to label multidimensional clusters of activities. The activities may include roll-call voting, bill and amendment sponsorship, floor and committee speeches, running for higher office, media appearances, trips home, use of staff, running for leadership posts, and even running for higher office.
Most uses of the term “styles” is purely behavioral. Nothing about the legislators’ roles or goals is implied, although roles or goals may help to explain styles. An important study in this vein is the work of Bernhard and Sulkin (see their Legislative Style, Chicago, 2018) in which legislators were grouped on the basis of their similarity in the performance of 16 activities. Five styles were identified for the period between 1989 and 2008. Policy specialist represented about 30 percent of House members. Party soldier and district advocate were both about 26 percent, while party builder was around 11 percent and ambitious entrepreneur, someone who ranked very high on nearly everything, represented less than four percent. The study is particularly important for showing how pre-congressional experience is related to legislative styles once elected to the House and how styles evolve over careers in the House and beyond.
The Bernard-Sulkin styles have some resemblance to goals and roles commonly identified in earlier studies, but their analysis makes more distinctions among legislators with respect to their legislative activities. Most important, the party builder and party soldier types show behavior oriented more to party activities than other legislators. This may be due, in part, to the more recent period covered by the Bernard-Sulkin study, but it certainly is related to the mix of behaviors included in the 16 activities that were measured.
We have learned a great deal from studies of roles, goals, and styles among members of Congress. Nevertheless, we suffer from knowing too little about how the political context—the election and campaigns environment and the distribution of power within the House and Senate—shapes how roles are defined, goals are pursued, and styles are formed. In part, this is a fault of political science—a changing Congress changes our research interests and takes us away from asking old questions. In the case of legislative styles, at least, we can hope that work like the Bernard-Sulkin study will be extended so that we can observe how congressional representation evolves.
[1] For a review of the study of legislative roles, see Malcolm E. Jewell and Samuel C. Patterson, The Legislative Process in the United States (Random House, 1973), Ch. 2.
[2] Richard F. Fenno, Jr., The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress (Little, Brown, 1966).
[3]Ibid., p. xvii.
[4] For background, see James L. Payne, “Show Horses & Work Horses in the United States House of Representatives,” Polity 12:3 (Spring 1980): 428-456.