Revisiting the Pre-Reform House

John E. Owens
The University of Westminster

One of the aims of contemporary political science, and social science in general, is to identify and explain the relationships between phenomena. Theory provides a vehicle through which data can be organised and interpreted, and hypotheses generated and tested. Of course, this generating and testing process can only be successful if our concepts are robust and applicable across time and space. So, through systematic and rigorous testing, concepts may be adapted, hypotheses reformulated, and theories revised or reformulated. Thus, we have a wealth of historically based, comparative, studies that offer important new insights into how Congress operates currently, as well as in the past. (e.g., Cooper and Brady 1981; Cox and McCubbins 1993; Mayhew 1991; Rohde 1991, Sinclair 1989).

One important method by which ideas about government and politics may be generated and tested is through comparison, including comparison over time. Either explicitly or implicitly, the reasons for employing an historical approach are the same as for the comparative method: unlike the physical sciences, we cannot design precise practical experiments to test the effects of one or more variables. We also want to avoid the twin pitfalls of either asserting uniqueness through false particularisation or generality through false universalism. So, in order to develop or refine theories and explanations and discover new information relevant to contemporary and historical phenomena, we compare systematically and explicitly across time. It is especially important to do this in the congressional research because our target is forever moving and the textbook is constantly being rewritten (Davidson 1986; Shepsle 1989). Not only has Congress changed. So has our knowledge of the institution. Tremendous advances have been made in legislative theory since the emergence of behaviouralism, including in the 1990s. The intellectual rewards of a comparative historical approach, then, are potentially great, as the work of other contributors to this Extension of Remarks emonstrate.

In a series of recent papers (2000), I have reexamined floor participation in the U.S. House of Representatives in the immediate postwar period. A considerable body of research in the 1950s, based on interviews and participant observation, showed that an all-embracing social order and institutional culture sustained a powerful set of norms, unwritten traditions, customs, and mores which had the effects of inspiring confidence and trust in committees and regulating participation in congressional proceedings. Although not "carved in stone", norms -- such as legislative work, specialisation, personal courtesy, reciprocity, institutional patriotism, deference to committees, apprenticeship, and seniority -- were said to have generated certain expectations about members' proper conduct and set parameters to acceptable behaviour and effectiveness (Matthews 1959, 1960; Huitt 1961; Fenno 1962, 1966, 1974; Clapp 1959; Martin 1960).

In his revisionist Participation in Congress (1996), Richard Hall explicitly rejected this cultural or "playing the game" explanation of congressional participation, arguing that Congress members, as rational actors, select when, where, and how they will participate. While most of us might find Hall's theory uncontroversial applied to the more individualistic postreform House, his conclusion that "most norms of a sociological sort never were alive, behaviourally speaking" in the pre-reform House is shocking. Hall provides an analysis of members' participation in House Education and Labor Committee markups on 25 measures considered in the 87th House (1961-1962) to support his argument. He finds little difference in participation patterns from those found in the postreform 97th House (1981-1982).

Even at first glance, Hall's argument seems to resonate. A quick canter through congressional history in the mid-decades of the twentieth century reveals a number of well-known House members - Democrats Fulbright, Patman, Powell, Voorhis, and McCarthy; Republicans Gross, Javits, Lindsay, and Nixon - who apparently did not take Rayburn's advice "to get along, go along" and engaged in vigorous legislative entrepreneurship either when they were first elected or soon after. Fulbright, for example, became a national celebrity in his first year in Congress when the House adopted his resolution calling for U.S. participation in what became the United Nations. Powell acquired a national reputation for promoting the interests of Afro-Americans when he offered his antidiscrimination amendment in his first term. And Nixon, on the back of his fierce election fight in 1946 with Voorhis, soon made a name for himself in the House and the country as an anticommunist obsessed with internal subversion and a sponsor of the Mundt-Nixon bill.

Logically, moreover, nonparticipation is not consistent with representing one's district, especially when the House deals with highly salient, controversial issues - as in the late 1940s, in respect of price controls, labor union regulation, new housing and welfare programmes, and major foreign policy issues; or the late 1950s, post-Brown, in respect of civil rights legislation. A priori, one would expect these issues to require House members' attention and participation, in disregard of "get along, go along" cultural and normative boundaries that prescribed limited participation.

Indeed, evidence found in Dick Fenno's research on the Education and Labor Committee in the late 1950s goes directly to this point. Fenno wrote that the committee (which handled highly salient legislation, including federal aid to education) "gives virtually no service to [the informal norm of apprenticeship]" and its decisions were frequently overturned on the floor. Fenno quotes one freshman Republican: "You know you aren't going to be the committee chairman, and you know you aren't going to get to sponsor a major piece of legislation, but other than that you can participate as much as you want . . . You can even get to take leadership on a bill in committee. . ." (Fenno 1969. My emphasis.)

House members participate in legislative activity in many ways. They can make a speech, insert a contribution into the Congressional Record, sponsor an amendment, offer a procedural motion, author a technical amendment, introduce a bill or resolution, or take action to include an issue on the House's legislative agenda. At the pre-floor stage, they can also participate in full or subcommittee proceedings or informal caucuses, or attempt to influence debate from outside through the mass media, for example. My investigation of legislative participation focuses only on floor amendment sponsorship. Floor amending activity cannot tell us everything about legislative participation and organisation in any given historical period, but it is surely one of the strongest forms of participation in the House in the sense that it is an activity that is typically time-consuming and labour-intensive and, potentially, has an impact on the substance of legislation approved by the House and Senate. Utilising a rich new data set, the larger project examines patterns of floor amending activity in the House between 1945 and 2000. Here, I discuss findings only in respect of 1945 and 1960.

Do patterns of floor amendment sponsorship between 1945 and 1960 provide support for cultural or purposive explanations of floor participation behaviour? Do patterns of amendment sponsorship at that time confirm the importance of apprenticeship, specialisation, and committee deference as vital normative guides to House floor participation? Or, is member participation in floor amending activity better explained at this time by a combination of normative and purposive factors? The work is still in progress and so results are provisional. However, several findings shed new light on the pre-reform House.

Selective Participation

Not surprisingly, as Hall argues, participation/amendment sponsorship is indeed confined to few House members and is clearly associated with seniority and, presumably, experience and  knowledge. As I have shown elsewhere, the trend in the volume of floor amending activity over the postwar period is curvilinear with peaks in the late 1940s, mid 1970s, and mid-1990s and troughs in the mid-1960s and late 1980s/early 1990s (1999). 

Apprenticeship

Focussing specifically on apprenticeship, I find limited support for the cultural explanation. In every House between 1945 and 1960, between one-quarter and one-half of all first-term members offered at least one floor amendment; while a small number of this group were in fact heavy amenders (In the 80th House, for example, first termer Jacob Javits offered as many as 22 amendments; while in the 82nd House George Meader offered 16 amendments.) More importantly, the differential sponsorship rates between juniors and seniors was not consistently wide - in two Houses, the gap was three times larger than in several other congresses; and in half the Houses in the period, the first-term rate was very close to that of more senior members in the later House. Clearly, on this evidence, something else was going on.

Salience

Hall's "rational apprenticeship" thesis suggests that participation (amendment sponsorship) is dependent upon legislators perceiving personal political interests at stake. To capture this idea, I devised two measures of salience and ran some analyses of variances that controlled for the overall salience of a legislative issue (based on contemporaneous evaluations derived from debates in Congressional Record) and the salience of an amendment to its sponsor (e.g., a district or personal interest). The results were mixed and showed significant variations over time: in the late 1940s both an issue's general salience and its salience to the specific member tended to trump any social norm prescribing nonparticipation by first-term members; whereas in the 1950s this was less often the case.

Specialisation

In the 1940s and 1950s, House culture also implied an expectation that members specialise in a narrow range of subjects within the jurisdiction of their assigned committee(s), that they concentrate on their committee work, and develop specialised subject expertise. Specialisation in committee work led to a strong group (committee) identification, a committee deference norm (e.g., Fenno 1962; Clapp 1963), and reciprocity which, among other requirements, determined that members of one committee -- and especially committee chairs -- did not interfere in the business of other committees.

Again, the results from the analysis were mixed, with clear differences between the more contentious late1940s and less contentious 1950s. Contra the cultural explanation, specialisation (measured by the percentage of committee nonmembers who offered floor amendments to measures not reported by their own committees) varied considerably and, once again, appeared to be tied to salience. The rate in the late 1940s was almost half as much again as in the 1950s suggesting weaker specialisation in the earlier period.

Committee Deference

The committee deference and chair reciprocity norms fared better. Even when the salience of legislative issues was controlled, in almost every House ANOVA results show significant behavioural differences between committee members and nonmembers' propensity to offer a floor amendment. Even so, considerable numbers of committee members and nonmembers refused to defer, including minority members of the reporting committee seeking to stake out their party's position in a wider, more public, forum. But minority committee members were not the only ones: slightly over half of amendments offered by majority committee members were also opposed by bill managers.

Reciprocity

Not surprisingly, the behaviour of committee chairs during this pre-reform period conforms closely to the cultural explanation. Although chairs conformed quite frequently to the rational participation model -- offering floor amendments to measures not reported by their own committees (and especially in the late 1940s) -- the vast majority of these amendments were agreed to by the reporting committee's chair, probably before being offered on the floor.

To get to the bottom of the cultural-rational participation debate in the context of the pre-reform House would require earlier generations of congressional scholars to have conducted systematic surveys of House members' expectations at the time, and to compare their results with actual observed behaviour. Now that time has passed, if we wish to reexamine the politics of previous eras, we need to reconcile ourselves to less than perfect data. To some extent, however, this shortcoming is compensated by the availability of new and relevant theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques that can help us better understand the past. On the evidence of my experience with this project, employing a comparative longitudinal research design /historical approach can be a very fruitful exercise. It is clearer now to me than it was before that, even allowing for variations from congress to congress, House politics in the 1940s was rather different from that in the 1950s, which for many commentators and scholars is the essential reference point for understanding the pre-reform House -- not surprisingly so, given the high turnover in House membership resulting from the changes in partisan control and a highly salient legislative agenda which encouraged members to participate.

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