wo decades ago, Wahlke argued forcefully that research on legislative representation should focus more effort on investi--JL gating patterns of public orientations toward representative institutions, mapping &dquo;the incidence and variations of support in specific systems,&dquo; and formulating &dquo;hypotheses about its conditions and correlates&dquo; (Wahlke 1978: 83). He advocated inquiry about &dquo;the role of the represented.&dquo;Citizens' orientations toward legislatures have, in fact, been investigated to some extent. Davidson and Parker (1972) opened up research on support for Congress more than twenty years ago (also see Davidson, Kovenock, and O'Leary 1966: 38-66); and the state of such research was synthesized ten years ago by Dennis (1981). Similar research was conducted with the state legislatures in mind during the 1970s (e.g., Patterson, Hedlund, and Boynton 1975). Most commonly, the thrust of research has gone to the extent of constituents' supportive or unsupportive evaluations of the legislature and its work. Do citizens generally approve or disapprove of the job the legislature does? Such inquiry about legislative performance is an effective, widely understood, and &dquo;probably the simplest and most direct&dquo; indicator of public support for the legislature (see Dennis 1981: 324;Ripley 1988). Why should support, or lack of support, for the legislature be investigated? Public support for Congress oscillates over time without
Political power in Congress, all observers agree, is highly decentralized. The factors chiefly responsible for this are also well known: weak national parties (in the Congress this results in strong constituency ties and weak leadership sanctions over members) and a highly developed division of labor through the committee system. A leadership endowed with few opportunities to punish and reward, coupled with specialization by policy area, inevitably produces an institution with numerous and disparate centers of power. Just as inevitably the politics of such an institution is compounded of persuasion, bargaining, and log-rolling.As weak as the legislative parties are, however, they still provide the major organizing force in Congress. Roll-call vote analyses have demonstrated this, and a recent study of the House Whip organizations also bears it out. Generally speaking, the single most important variable explaining legislative outcomes is party organization.
In the literature on political parties in the United States Congress two points are usually stressed. First, it is said that the political party label lacks a precise programmatic content because “party government” in the British sense is absent in the American Congress. Second, however, it is contended that the party label is the single most important and reliable attribute in predicting the voting behavior of a Senator or Representative.Between these two contentions lies a sizeable area of unexplored territory. If party is the best predictive device in analyzing voting behavior in Congress then, despite the lack of “party government,” the party machinery in both houses must have effects that deserve study. Professor Huitt has suggested the necessity and importance of this kind of study: “… the preoccupation with reform has obscured the fact that we have no really adequate model of party leadership as it exists in Congress, and that none can be constructed because we lack simple descriptions of many of the basic working parts of the present system.” Huitt himself and a few others have filled some of these gaps.
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