editor's introduction

Editor's IntroductionAuthor(s): Malcolm E. JewellSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Aug., 1979), pp. 321-324Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439578 .

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Editor's Introduction

The assumption underlying this Quarterly is that legislatures are not unique institutions and that it is useful to compare legislative bodies, across nations and states and across time. We believe that there are particularly promising opportunities for comparisons between the U.S. Congress and American state legislatures, although scholars specializing on one of these types of institutions have often ignored the other.

This issue begins with a pair of articles that ask similar questions and employ similar techniques to study the use of casework-and more particularly the utility of casework for legislative oversight of the executive-in the U.S. Congress and in two American state legislatures: Minnesota and Kentucky. In recent years there has been increasing recognition of the importance of constituency service, or casework, in a variety of legislative bodies. Students of Congress, in particular, have described how congressmen are able to use their extensive staff resources and their many opportunities to provide services as vehicles for building a strong political base and often a large electoral margin. While legislators in most states lack such staff resources, many of them regard constituency casework as a major part of their job. Richard Elling's article is one of the first to provide systematic data on the scope and content of state legislative casework.

Both John Johannes, in his study of Congress, and Elling, in his study of state legislatures, ask essentially the same question about casework: how much utility does it have for oversight of the executive? Both of them have conducted interviews with both legislative and administrative personnel. The two studies generally agree that casework may have utility for oversight but that a number of factors are likely to constrain that utility. Both the amount of casework and the resources available for handling it are much greater in Congress than in most state legislatures; similarly, Congress has greater opportunities and resources for oversight of the administration. Therefore, it is not surprising that Johannes seems to find that the utility of casework for oversight is greater in Congress than Elling finds it to be in the two state legislatures.

Legislative Studies Quarterly, IV, 3, August, 1979 Copyright 1979 by the Comparative Legislative Research Center 0362-9805/79/0403-0321$00.20 321



Legislative Studies Quarterly

Despite these differences, the two authors find similar factors constraining the effectiveness of casework as a technique for oversight. Some congressional offices and many state legislators handle relatively few constitu- ent requests that require more than routine interaction with administrative agencies. The requests from constituents tend to be concentrated in a few substantive areas, and thus relate to only a few agencies. Consequently, casework offers little or no opportunity for improving oversight of many agencies. Moreover, at the state level, many requests pertain to strictly local, or even federal, problems. State legislators are generally understaffed and therefore have little opportunity to pursue the oversight implications of con- stituent complaints. Most congressional staffs are overworked and may not be organized or motivated to consider oversight. For any oversight to occur, the individual congressman or legislator must be sufficiently motivated to devote time to that area; but many of them consider oversight to be less important than legislating and providing constituency service. Moreover, the congressman or legislator has the best opportunity for engaging in oversight activities within his committees, and much of his casework is likely to pertain to topics that are outside the scope of his committees.

Elling's study of two states offers some suggestions about how the development of constituency service may be affected by differences in state political culture as well as in legislative schedules. (Kentucky legislators may devote more time to constituency service because rigid constitutional limits reduce the amount of time that can be spent on legislating.) If we are to understand the growth of constituency service work, and its relationship to oversight, at the state level, we obviously need studies from more states. In recent interviews with legislators in a number of states, I have found large variations both among states and within states in the amount of time and attention legislators spend on casework. The norms of the legislature and the availability of staff clearly affect legislative casework. Within states, it appears that lower income, urban districts generate more demands for service; single- member districts produce more casework than multi-member districts; and those legislators who get the most requests are the ones who believe that is an important part of their job and make themselves available for such service.

The study of party voting in American legislatures, and especially Congress, is a favorite topic of political scientists. Most such studies deal with the contemporary period, but there has been a recent increase in studies that provide historical perspective. Brady, Cooper, and Hurley begin their study of party voting in the U.S. House with a remarkably comprehensive table that summarizes the level of conflict between parties, and the level of cohesion in each party, for each Congress from 1886 to that elected in 1966. These data should be useful for anyone who wants to test his or her own theory about the causes of ebb and flow in party voting.

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Obviously in such a longitudinal study it is not possible to measure the effect of every variable that we would suspect has some impact, and it is particularly difficult to assess the importance of idiosyncratic factors like the skill of individual leaders. The authors of this study concentrate on several external and internal variables. The external ones are electoral turnover, partisanship of the president, party conflict, and party homogeneity; the internal ones are centralized leadership and the strength of the caucus. In general, the authors find that the external variables they have used have a greater impact on party voting than the internal ones. Their model also permits them to identify those sessions of Congress that do not fit the model, and thus suggests where we might expect to find idiosyncratic factors at work.

Despite the attention to legislative oversight and constituency service, emphasized earlier in this introduction, a large part of the congressman's job is legislating. In his study of "Who Makes Our Laws?", Stephen Frantzich asks a very simple question: what are the characteristics of those congressmen who sponsor the most legislation and of those who get the most bills passed? Obviously these two indicators are only rough measures of legislative success, but they have the advantage of being simple and quantifiable. He finds that Democrats, leaders, senior members, and those who are electorally secure introduce more legislation than other congressmen. Somewhat surprisingly, congressmen elected by narrow margins do not seem to believe that there are electoral payoffs in introducing bills. These same four characteristics of congressmen are associated with success in getting bills enacted; when controls are imposed it is Democrats and leaders who are most likely to be successful. Finally, it should be noted that liberals are somewhat more likely to introduce bills than conservatives, but that moderates have a somewhat higher rate of success in getting bills passed.

The last two papers in this issue deal with various aspects of recruitment and career patterns. Irwin Gertzog examines the changing patterns of recruitment of women members to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1916 to 1976. He does, in fact, find that there is a "new breed" of congress- women. They are much less likely to be widows of congressmen who have died in office, and they are less likely to come from families with great wealth or a long history of political activity. The new congresswoman is much more likely to have legal training and to have had elective experience, and also to be younger. The author concludes that there had been an increase in the proportion of women who have access to the effective political opportunity structure and who are available for public office.

After reading Gertzog's article, one is almost forced to ask why, if opportunity and availability are increasing, the number of women elected to Congress has not increased more dramatically in recent years. A number of women seek congressional office, but some persons have argued that established

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political leaders encourage women candidates more often for races that are likely to be lost. Recent literature has called attention to the role of women in state legislatures (Irene Diamond's Sex Roles in the State House). Both the number and influence of women in legislatures varies extensively from state to state, and we need continuing efforts to explain the reasons for differences and to follow whatever trends are occurring.

Studies of the recruitment of legislators usually fail to consider the development of career patterns after entry into the legislature. Yet recruitment can be regarded as a process which continues after the initial selection of members of the legislature, to include their rise to leadership positions, to higher political offices outside the legislature, as well as to their eventual defeat or resignation. In their article on legislative recruitment in the Netherlands, Irwin, Budge, and Farlie compare the factors which favor initial election to parliament with the factors which lead to subsequent success or failure.

On the basis of interviews with nearly all of the members of the Dutch Parliament elected in 1968, the authors distinguish between the usual social background characteristics of MPs and their attitudes toward parliamentary work. They trace the careers of the "class of 1968" for six years which included two subsequent elections, and classify the MPs into those who dropped out of politics, those who stayed in Parliament or in an equivalent political position, and those who advanced to higher political office.

The authors compare the capacity of social background and attitudinal characteristics to correctly predict the subsequent careers of these MPs, using Bayes' Theorem to calculate probabilities that a given individual will belong to a particular career category on the basis of his known background and attitudes. They reach the conclusion that while social background characteristics predict initial recruitment to parliament, attitudinal factors are more important in determining the subsequent careers of MPs. This finding, if duplicated in further research, would suggest that the social background of individuals may affect their electoral success, but that their further success in parliamentary politics is significantly determined by their attitudes to specific attributes of the institution of parliament. Thus political-institutional factors might be more significant than we have realized in influencing political careers.

-Malcolm E. Jewell

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