¹ The literature on legislative norms is quite extensive. For a discussion of Senate norms, see Matthews, Donald R., U.S. Senators and Their World (New York: Random House, 1960)Google Scholar and White, William S., Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957)Google Scholar and two articles by Huitt, Ralph, “The Outsider in the Senate: An Alternative Role,” American Political Science Review, 55 (September, 1961), pp. 566–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “The Morse Committee Assignment Controversy: A Study in Senate Norms,” American Political Science Review, 51 (June, 1957), pp. 313–29. For information on House norms, see Clapp, Charles L., The Congressman: His Work as He Sees It (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1963)Google Scholar; Tacheron, Donald G. and Udall, Morris K., The Job of the Congressman (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966)Google Scholar; and Miller, Clem, Member of the House: Letters of a Congressman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962).Google Scholar Also relevant to the House is the growing body of literature on committee integration and the norms that promote it. The foremost articles in this area are Fenno, Richard F. Jr., “The House Appropriations Committee as a Political System: The Problem of Integration,” American Political Science Review, 56 (June, 1962), pp. 310–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Manley, John F., “The House Committee on Ways and Means: Conflict Management in a Congressional Committee,” American Political Science Review, 59 (December, 1965), pp. 927–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the broader studies by these authors: Fenno, Richard F. Jr., The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966)Google Scholar and Manley, John F., The Politics of Finance (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970).Google Scholar At the state legislative level, the reader can turn to Wahlke, Johnet al., The Legislative System (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1962)Google Scholar; Jewell, Malcolm E., The State Legislature: Politics and Practice (New York: Random House, 1962)Google Scholar; and Barber, James D., The Lawmakers: Recruitment and Adaptation to Legislative Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).Google Scholar Finally, for an example of research in a non-American setting, see Kornberg, Allan, “The Rules of the Game in the Canadian House of Commons,” Journal of Politics, 26 (May, 1964), pp. 358–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Recently, there has been a greater emphasis on the legislative newcomer and his adaptation to the institution, with one article specifically concerned with the rules of the game, although from a different perspective than employed herein. In a panel study of freshman California assemblymen, Bell and Price found that norm learning did take place. They wrote: “A whole host of ‘in-house’ norms were cited after legislative experience had been acquired. Rules pertaining to committee decorum and management of bills were frequently cited in the second and third interviews; they were not often cited in the first interview.” See Price, Charles M. and Bell, Charles G., “The Rules of the Game: Political Fact or Academic Fancy?” Journal of Politics, 32 (November, 1970), p. 855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For more general discussions of freshman adaptation, see Bell, Charles G. and Price, Charles M., “Pre-Legislative Sources of Representational Roles,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 13 (May, 1969), pp. 254–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gertzog, Irwin N., “The Socialization of Freshman Congressmen: Some Agents of Organizational Continuity,” Paper prepared for delivery at the 66th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, September 8–12, 1970, pp. 1–26.Google Scholar

³ Asher, Herbert B., “The Freshman Congressman: A Developmental Analysis” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1970).Google Scholar

⁴ The selection of the times for the two waves, particularly the first, was no easy matter. Since a prime concern of my research was freshman attitudes to legislative norms, I wished to interview sufficiently early so as to ascertain these attitudes while uninfluenced by House service. But seminars for freshman representatives were held early in the session (January 8 through January 13) and at these meetings a large amount of material, some of it relevant to legislative norms, was presented to the freshmen. Thus, it would have been advantageous to talk to the newcomers before these seminars were held. But in terms of my interest in internal House voting cues, interviewing in early January would have made little sense as almost no legislative business was underway. In retrospect, the problem was not very serious as evidenced by a question included in the interview schedule designed to measure the impact of the freshman seminars. Freshmen generally indicated that the seminars were interesting and highly informative with respect to parliamentary procedures and the services available to congressmen, but generally attributed little influence to the seminars vis-à-vis House norms. Similar opinions were expressed by freshman participants in the 1959 seminars. My thanks go to Representative Morris Udall for allowing me to rummage through his files on previous freshman seminars.

There remains the possibility that substantial norm learning may have occurred in the postelection period prior to the freshman's formal entry into the House, a “waiting period” during which many freshmen took some action with regard to their future committee assignment or journeyed to Washington to handle personal business. Thus, there was certainly opportunity for norm learning to have occurred in this period, although freshmen indicated little such activity in response to questions about the waiting period. Unfortunately, resource constraints prevented a third wave of interviews shortly after the November election.

⁵ The nonfreshman members of the House were stratified according to party, region, and seniority, and proportionate samples were selected randomly within these strata. The interviews obtained were very representative of Republican House membership, while they underrepresented Democrats in general and senior, southern Democrats in particular. The following figures indicate how well the nonfreshman sample matches the overall population in terms of party and seniority where a threefold classification of seniority based on the number of terms served prior to the start of the 91st Congress is used. Low seniority was defined as three or fewer terms, moderate as four and five terms, and high as more than five terms.

Despite the underrepresentation of senior Democrats, there were no significant ideological differences between the samples selected from each stratum and the corresponding parent stratum as measured by CQ conservative coalition support scores and ADA and ACA ratings.

⁶ The actual question that Wahlke and his colleagues used was: “We've been told that every legislature has its unofficial rules of the game—certain things they must do and things they must not do if they want the respect and cooperation of fellow members. What are some of these things—these ‘rules of the game’—that a member must observe to hold the respect and cooperation of his fellow members?” See Wahlke, et al., The Legislative System, p. 143.Google Scholar

⁷ The norm of institutional patriotism was also investigated, but its operationalization was so narrow that the responses obtained were not very interesting. Members were asked whether they would ever criticize the House, and, not unexpectedly, most said that they would which presumably implies that institutional patriotism is not a viable norm. But institutional patriotism is far more complex than merely refraining from criticism so that nothing more will be said about the norm in the remainder of this paper.

⁸ Some of the nonfreshman interviews were taken at t₁ and the others at t₂ There was very high agreement on some of the norms questions asked at t, and these were omitted at t₂ so that more attention could be devoted to other items. This accounts for the various N's on the norms questions. There was no reason to believe that the responses to the norms questions that were omitted at t₂ contained any systematic biases. The actual questions for each of the norms were: Do you think congressmen should specialize in a field or should try to be generalists? Do you think most of the important work of the House is done on the floor or in committees? How important do you think it is to maintain friendly relationships with your fellow congressmen? Do you think that freshman congressmen should serve a period of apprenticeship, that is, be more an observer than an active participant in the legislative process? How important do you think learning the House procedural rules is? Would you ever personally criticize a fellow representative on the floor of the House? Would you vote a certain way on a bill that you cared little about in order to gain the vote of a fellow congressman on a bill that you did care about?

It should be noted here that the question about where the important work of the House is done does not tap a norm in the same sense as the other items, but rather elicits a belief or opinion. Once we have found marked disagreement with certain items thought to be legislative norms, then by definition these items no longer are norms. But for simplicity of presentation, the word norm will be used in the subsequent analysis to apply to those items such as apprenticeship about which there was substantial disagreement.

⁹ It is very difficult to gather systematic information on the “proper” activist who observes the rules of the game vs. the one who does not, but scattered references to various individuals in the course of interviewing suggested that these two general types were meaningful for some members of Congress. For example, specific comparisons twice were made between the “proper” liberal described above and another liberal Democratic freshman from the same region and with similar issue concerns. These comparisons were unfavorable toward the latter freshman because of his excessive behavior. He was criticized for shooting off his mouth too much and for making too many entries in the Congressional Record. An examination of the actual number of entries indicated that the perceptions of his behavior were accurate: he was the most verbose newcomer with nearly twice as many distinct items in the Record as his “proper” freshman colleague. It is noteworthy that such behavior is salient to Congressmen and that reputations, whether good or bad, can be created by such activity. In one of the rare attempts to talk in systematic and quantitative terms about the sanctions invoked against nonconformists, Wayne Swanson found that liberals, and especially anti-establishment liberals, lagged behind in advancing up the committee hierarchy in the Senate. See Swanson, Wayne R., “Committee Assignments and the Non-Conformist Legislator: Democrats in the U.S. Senate,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 13 (February, 1969), pp. 84–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ There are numerous other plausible sources of party differences toward vote trading; unfortunately, we do not have adequate data to check these out. One explanation concerns the recruitment of candidates by each party. It may be that Republicans in general turn to less political types, often businessmen, who may be naive about politics and therefore not recognize the validity and usefulness of such activities as vote-trading, bargaining, compromise, and the like. While four of the six Republican freshmen in this group did not serve in the state legislature, it is interesting to note that four of the six also had as their primary occupation a business-related activity rather than the legal profession which was by far the most common occupation of the 91st class. Another explanation of this possible party difference is the position of the Democrats and Republicans as fairly permanent majority and minority parties in the House. This may mean that the responsibility for the passage of legislation is left more to the majority Democrats who must then engage in the vote trading and logrolling necessary to forge a majority coalition. It may be that Republicans tend to see this activity as illegitimate since they so often come out on the losing side, but this is purely speculative.

¹¹ Contrary to my expectation, it turned out that members from districts closer to Washington did not have higher absentee rates. But then one might argue that their scores would have been even higher had their districts been more distant from the Capitol.

¹² Overall, Republican freshmen missed 13 per cent of the quorum votes and Democrats 17 per cent. Southern freshmen in each party had the lowest absentee rates on the quorum votes—13 per cent for Democrats and 8 per cent for Republicans. This may be due to the fact that southern freshmen were more oriented toward the House in career terms and were therefore more likely to perform those tasks that promote a legislative career. Although I do not have data on this, there is no reason to believe that southern freshmen returned to their districts less often than their nonsouthern colleagues which then would have accounted for their higher attendance rates. In fact, five of the 11 southern districts were easily within three to five hours of Washington by car. Thus, it appears that there were regional differences in attendance rates which may reflect differing career views of the office of representative.

¹³ The issue orientation of the freshmen was determined by impressionistically content-analyzing their responses to a series of questions dealing with their legislative goals, the specific pieces of legislation, if any, that they planned to introduce or work for, and the kinds of legislative matters about which their districts were most concerned.

¹⁴ The percentages of Table 4 are for freshmen in the aggregate. Thus, zero per cent change does not necessarily mean that all the freshmen interviewed at t₁ and t₂ remained perfectly stable; shifts in one direction may have balanced out those in the other. As it was, there was general stability in the replies except for the two items discussed in the text (personal criticism and spending time on the House floor) so that the percentage differences in Table 4 do not mask much additional shifting.

¹⁵ As a reminder to the reader, the actual apprenticeship question was: Do you think that freshman Congressmen should serve a period of apprenticeship, that is, be more an observer than an active participant in the legislative process? In the subsequent discussion, apprenticeship will be treated as a dichotomous variable by collapsing the agreement and qualified agreement categories and by combining the disagreement and qualified disagreement categories.

¹⁶ These measures are merely counts of the total number of entries in the Record and the total number of nonrelief bills and resolutions introduced. They could be refined by grouping remarks in the Record according to issue area or by dividing bills according to their scope of impact. But the expenditure of resources in such an endeavor seemed prohibitive. As sponsorship of bills is so prevalent in the House, the number of bills introduced may be a highly misleading measure of legislative activity. A better indicator might be the number of amendments introduced. But since amendments from freshmen are relatively rare (only about one-fourth sponsored any), they cannot provide us with sufficient information.

¹⁷ At the start of the 91st Congress, 21 per cent of the 243 Democrats had served more than 20 years (ten terms) in the House as compared to under six per cent of the 192 Republicans. Or to restate the figures, the Republicans had only eleven members with more than 20 years of service, while the Democrats had 51 such members. Furthermore, 46.4 per cent of the Republicans had served three or fewer terms as opposed to 31.7 per cent of the Democrats.

¹⁸ Clapp, , The Congressman, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Ripley, Randall B., Power in the Senate (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969), p. 185Google Scholar and Polsby, Nelson W., “Goodbye to the Inner Club,” in Congressional Behavior, ed. Polsby, Nelson W. (New York: Random House, 1971) pp. 105–10.Google Scholar

²⁰ A good example of such research is Fenno's treatment of apprenticeship in the context of the House Appropriations Committee. See The Power of the Purse, pp. 166–67.

²¹ Price, and Bell, , “The Rules of the Game,” p. 855.Google Scholar