1 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 29–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The only published information on M.P.‘s’ role socialization can be found in David Hoffman and Norman Ward's study. They state that 46 per cent of the M.P.'s reported that their role conceptions had not changed as a result of post-election experiences. Hoffman, and Ward, , Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the Canadian House of Commons (Ottawa, Queen's Printer, 1970), 89–90.Google Scholar Other available information on M.P.‘s’ political socialization deals only with one aspect of general political socialization, that is, the development of an initial interest in politics. See Kornberg, Allan, Canadian Legislative Behaviour (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar; Hoffman and Ward, Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 57–60. See also Kornberg, Allan and Thomas, Norman C., “The Political Socialization of National Legislative Elites in the United States and Canada,” Journal of Politics 27 (1965), 761–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

A handful of studies of legislative role socialization have been carried out in the United States. See, for example, Price, Charles M. and Bell, Charles G., “The Rules of the Game: Political Fact or Academic Fancy,” Journal of Politics 32 (1970), 839–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Asher, Herbert B., “The Learning of Legislative Norms,” American Political Science Review 67 (1973), 499–513.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Kornberg, Canadian Legislative Behavior, 8.

3 See, for example, Kornberg, Canadian Legislative Behavior, chs. 5 and 6; Hoffman and Ward, Bilingualism and Biculturalism, ch. 4.

4 For example, Asher concludes that “[i]t appeared that freshmen largely knew the general House norms prior to entering Congress.… And the extent of change once in office was minimal.” Asher, “Learning of Legislative Norms,” 512, emphasis added. Similarly, in his study of San Francisco Bay Area councilmen, Prewitt found that “there is little need for in-role socialization among councilmen because their anticipatory socialization was so effective.” Kenneth Prewitt, The Recruitment of Political Leaders: A Study of Citizen-Politicians (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill), 120, n. 7. See also ch. 7 of this work.

5 Hoffman and Ward, Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 89–90.

6 These data were gathered in a 1972 mail survey of all backbench M.L.A.'s in Canada. For details concerning this study see Clarke, Harold D., Price, Richard G. and Krause, Robert, “Constituency Service among Canadian Provincial Legislators: Basic Findings and a Test of Three Hypotheses,” this Journal 8 (1975), 525–26.Google Scholar

7 Kornberg, Canadian Legislative Behavior, 10.

8 For relevant literature on the constituency service dimension of the role of the legislator in Canada see Clarke, Price and Krause, “Constituency Service among Canadian Provincial Legislators,” 520–21.

9 Kornberg, for example, found that 66 per cent of the M.P.'s he studied in 1962 were raised in homes in which family members were active politically or where there was “considerable political discussion.” Kornberg, Canadian Legislative Behavior, 47. Similar tendencies have been documented in a number of studies carried out in the United States. See Prewitt, Kenneth, “Political Socialization and Leadership Selection,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 361 (September 1965), 96–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Czudnowski, Moshe, “Political Recruitment,” Handbook of Political Science, vol. 2, ed. by Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W. (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 189–190.Google Scholar

10 Prewitt, Recruitment of Political Leaders, passim.

11 Ibid., 106.

12 In this regard Kornberg concluded that many M.P.'s, because of their extensive involvement in party activities, were intensely partisan and committed to their party's general ideological position prior to their election to Parliament. Kornberg, Allan, “Caucus and Cohesion in Canadian Parliamentary Parties,” American Political Science Review 65 (1966), 83–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Furthermore, a more detailed classification is not necessary for this analysis which focusses on the overall degree of development of M.P.‘s’ role concepts rather than on the complexity of particular aspects of such concepts.

14 As a validity check M.P.‘s’ subjective assessments of pre-nomination levels of knowledge about the job of being an M.P. were crosstabulated with the number of different job features mentioned. The relationship is strong and positive (Gamma = +.7) and thus indicates the utility of the “number of job features” variable as a measure of pre-nomination role socialization.

15 For the tabular analyses, Tau C is used as a summary statistic. Tau C is appropriate in situations (such as the present one) where both the independent and dependent variables are ordinal scale measures. See Blalock, Hubert, Social Statistics (2nd ed., Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 421–27.Google Scholar

16 “In essence it [MCA] is multiple regression using dummy variables. Its chief advantage over conventional dummy variable regression is a more convenient input arrangement and understandable output that focuses on sets of predictors…, and on the extent and direction of the adjustments made for intercorrelations among the sets of predictors.” Andrews, Frank, Morgan, James and Sonquist, John, Multiple Classification Analysis (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, 1967), 9–10.Google Scholar

17 In this study respondents were asked questions re rates of participation in several different kinds of political activities at federal and provincial levels. For further information on these items see “The 1974 Canadian National Election Study Codebook,” Inter-university Consortium for Behavioural Research, York University, Toronto.

18 The proposition that many M.P.'s have been exposed to a high level of political stimuli through the medium of the family is substantiated further by reports of levels of political discussion in the home during childhood and adolescence. Nearly four-fifths of the M.P.'s reported at least “some” discussion of politics and 36.2 per cent stated that there was “a great deal” of political discussion.

It should be noted that the implicit assumption underlying the comparison of the political activity levels of M.P.‘s’ parents with the 1974 mass public sample is that inter-generational differences in political participation rates in Canada are not significant.

19 The lack of provincial legislative experience among the freshmen M.P.'s is congruent with the conclusion of Surich and Williams that there are separate recruitment “streams” for federal and provincial politics. See Surich, Joachim and Williams, Robert J., “Some Characteristics of Candidates in the 1972 Canadian Federal Election,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Toronto, June 1974.Google Scholar For further data supporting the notion of separate federal and provincial recruitment “streams” see March, Roman, The Myth of Parliament (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 31.Google Scholar

20 March, for example, in discussing what he calls “training for Parliament,” comments that “[i]t could be argued that service in the provincial legislature is far more useful for an MP than service in municipal politics.…” (Myth of Parliament, 31.)

21 See, for example, Hess, Robert D. and Torney, Judith V., The Development of Political Attitudes in Children (Chicago: Aldine, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 5; Jennings, M. Kent and Niemi, Richard G., “The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child,” American Political Science Review 62 (1968), 169–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 It is also possible that the effects of the politicized family are both direct and indirect. Even if this is true, however, one could still argue that the direct effects are more important. With the aid of additional data, it should be possible to determine more precisely the nature of the causal processes in question through the use of statistical techniques such as path analysis. On the use of path analysis for decomposing direct, indirect and spurious effects see Nie, Normanet al., Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (2nd ed., Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 378–88.Google Scholar

23 See 397–98 above.

24 March, Myth of Parliament, 39; Lovink, J. A. A., “Is Canadian Politics too Competitive?” this Journal 6 (1973), 368.Google Scholar

25 On M.P.‘s’ attitudes toward parliamentary reform see Lovink, J. A. A., “Who Wants Parliamentary Reform?” Queen's Quarterly 74(1972), 505–12.Google Scholar Surveying Members in the Twenty-eighth Parliament (1968–72) Lovink found 33 per cent of the M.P.'s were in favour of some type of reform.

26 Measuring the extent of political ambition is difficult. Although the comment of one of the freshmen surveyed in this study that “[e]very MP comes to Ottawa with a baton in his knapsack” would seem somewhat exaggerated, it does appear that many freshmen do entertain political ambitions. For example, fully 42.5 per cent of the new Members stated explicitly that their long-term political career goal was a Cabinet post. Many other new Members “hedged” on this question, stating they were adopting a “wait and see” position. Only a small minority explicitly denied any long-term office goals.

27 Similarly, Lovink comments that the group of M.P.'s in favour of parliamentary reform “seemed to contain a disproportionately large segment of potential Cabinet material, the existing institutional arrangement ‘seriously underemployed’ their capacities and placed them under excessive pressure to give wholesale support to legislation whose merits were not always obvious.” Lovink, “Who Wants Parliamentary Reform?” 510.

28 See, for example, Price and Bell, “Rules of the Game,” 855. Similarly, in unpublished research on provincial M.L.A.'s, Clarke, Price and Krause found that 23.1 per cent of the M.L.A.'s reported “a great deal” of change in job concepts as a result of “on the job” experiences.

29 Some specific suggestions in this regard are contained in Clarke, Price and Krause, “Constituency Service among Canadian Provincial Legislators,” 541–42.

30 The importance of personality variables for understanding the behaviour of legislators and other political elites has been argued eloquently by James David Barber. See Barber, James David, The Lawmakers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, and his The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972). On the importance of motivational variables in legislative arenas other than those in the United States see Woshinsky, Oliver H., The French Deputy (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973).Google Scholar

31 On this point, see Barber, The Lawmakers, ch. 6.