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Liberal and Conservative Voting in the House of Representatives: A National Model of Representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

John E. Schwarz ,
Barton Fenmore  and
Thomas J. Volgy
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Extract

Critics of the American House of Representatives frequently cite, in one form or another, a national model of representation as a basis for criticizing both the House and the behaviour of some of its individual members. One of the more familiar criticisms, for example, is that members of the House are so motivated by local or regional concerns and interests that representation in some meaningful national form is rendered almost impossible. So widely is this characterization shared that it is hardly ever asked whether or not members of the House behave in ways that would be consistent and meaningful in terms of a national model of representation.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 317 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 For some examples, see American Political Science Association Committee on Political Parties, Toward a More Responsible Two-Parly System (New York: Rinehart, 1950)Google Scholar; Burns, James MacGregor, Deadlock of Democracy: Four Party Politics in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963)Google Scholar; Clark, Joseph S., Congress: The Sapless Branch (New York: Harper and Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Huntington, Samuel, ‘Congressional Responses to the Twentieth Century’Google Scholar, in Truman, David B., ed., Congress and America's Future (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973)Google Scholar. For additional citations of literature of the same genre and summaries of the arguments put forth, see Saloma, John S. III, Congress and the New Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 28–56Google Scholar; Davidson, Roger et al. , Congress in Crisis: Politics and Congressional Reform (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1966), pp. 7–37.Google Scholar

2 Often the defence of Congress against the critics simply involves a more thorough presentation of the advantages of a localized form of representation rather than close inspection of whether the Congress may not already actually operate in a fashion that bears some consistency with the national form of representation the critics propose. See De Grazia, Alfred, Republic in Crisis: Congress Against the Executive Force (New York: Federal Legal Publications, 1965)Google Scholar: Ranney, Austin and Kendall, Wilmoore, Democracy and the American Party System (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956).Google Scholar

3 For summaries of such proposals and a supporting bibliography, see Saloma, III, Congress and the New Politics, pp. 28–56Google Scholar; Davidson, et al. , Congress in Crisis, pp. 7–37.Google Scholar

4 This is demonstrated by Unekis, Joseph K., ‘From Committee to the Floor: Consistency in Congressional Voting’, Journal of Politics, XL (1978), 761–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For descriptions of British models of national representation, see Birch, A. H., Representative and Responsible Government: An Essay on the British Constitution (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), especially pp. 114–19Google Scholar; Beer, Samuel, British Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: Knopf, 1966)Google Scholar. Our characterization is particularly based on the programmatic model as expressed in the British Labour (or Socialist) version of representation. This particular orientation toward parliamentary representation first became especially prominent when Labour controlled a parliamentary majority for the first time, during the period 1945–51. As it happens, this period was also a time during which American political scientists in large numbers began to look to the theoretical working of the British political process as a model for reform of the American system. The influence of a programmatic model of representation along British lines can thus be seen in American thinking about reform from a very early point. See the American Political Science Association Committee on Political Parties, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, and Burns, James MacGregor, Congress on Trial: The Legislature and the Administrative State (New York: Harper and Row, 1949).Google Scholar

6 There is a tendency in American politics and political science to conceptualize representation as oriented toward the whole polity or oriented toward the district as if these were two different roles rather than a single role. See Davidson, Roger, The Role of the Congressman (New York: Pegasus, 1969)Google Scholar and Eulau, Heinz et al. , The Legislative System (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959).Google Scholar

7 See Nie, Norman et al. , The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Boyd, Richard W., ‘Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election’, American Political Science Review, LXVI (1972), 429–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Arthur H. et al. , ‘A Majority Party in Disarray: Policy Polarization in the 1972 Election’, American Political Science Review, LXX (1976), 753–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pomper, Gerald, ‘From Confusion to Clarity: Issues and American Voters, 1956–68’, American Political Science Review, LXVI (1972), 415–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and RePass, David E., ‘Issue Salience and Party Choice’, American Political Science Review, LXV (1971), 389–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Margolis's critique of this literature, see fn. 8.

8 Margolis, Michael, ‘From Confusion to Confusion: Issues and the American Voter’, American Political Science Review, LXXI (1977), 31–44Google Scholar, has produced evidence which, he argues, indicates that the public did not distinguish between the parties along liberal and conservative lines as much as the growing literature, cited in n. 7, had found. Margolis focused an important section of his work on the six issues that Gerald Pomper (‘From Confusion to Clarity’) had earlier used as the foundation for his research. Restricting ourselves for the moment to the 1964 and 1968 elections, let us consider that part of the public which knew about or had an interest in an issue. On each of the six issues Margolis used and for each of the elections, this part of the public amounted to more than 70 per cent of the voters. According to Margolis's own data (p. 35), never did more than 15 per cent of this rather large interested public view the Republican party as the more liberal of the parties on any of the issues. In contrast, on five of the six issues, at least four times as many people (always comprising an absolute majority of the public on each issue) considered the Democratic party to be the more liberal. Of course, Margolis contended that this tendency was probably even less evident in 1972. But the relation between taking a liberal or conservative stance on issues and support for McGovern or Nixon in the 1972 election was so strong that it is hard to imagine it being stronger. Thus, Miller, ‘A Majority Party in Disarray’, shows that slightly over 70 per cent of those identifying themselves as liberal on issues supported McGovern in 1972 whereas just 12 per cent of those identifying themselves as conservative supported McGovern (p. 763, Table 2 g). The same pattern prevailed on many major issues, as Miller, , pp. 762–7, shows.Google Scholar

9 Miller, , ‘A Majority Party in Disarray’Google Scholar; Boyd, , ‘Popular Control of Public Policy’.Google Scholar

10 Schwarz, John E. and Fenmore, Barton, ‘Presidential Elections and Congressional Voting: Ideological Voting Behaviour in the House, 1964–72’ (paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 1977), pp. 6–9, and Table 1.Google Scholar

11 The various reasons include: that members, since they come from the districts, tend generally to share their districts' way of thinking; that members may think it their job to reflect opinion in the district; that members may think their own election might depend on being in step, or not way out of step, with the district. See Kingdon, John, Congressmen's Voting Decisions (New York: Harper and Row, 1973)Google Scholar; Davidson, , The Role of the CongressmanGoogle Scholar: Burns, , Deadlock of Democracy.Google Scholar

12 Weissberg, Robert, ‘Collective vs. Dyadic Representation in Congress’, American Political Science Review, LXXII (1978), 535–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Fenno, Richard F. Jr., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 144.Google Scholar

14 A particularly interesting study of this kind examined how well members' ADA scores could predict the members' voting records in comparison with the predictive ability of other familiar variables used in congressional research. Among the other variables considered were members' party affiliation, orientation towards special interests in the field covered, and potential government spending that would come about in the districts as a consequence of the decisions covered. Within the policy area examined, the research found the members' ADA scores to be demonstrably superior predictors of the members' voting behaviour when compared to any other variable. See Bernstein, Robert A. and Anthony, William W., ‘The ABM Decision in the Senate: The Influence of Ideology’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), 1198–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Data on the presidential and congressional vote in the districts are compiled from Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, No. 13, 26 03 1965Google Scholar; Barone, Michael, Ujifsa, Grant and Matthews, Douglas, The Almanac of American Politics, 1972 (London: Gambit, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Barone, Michael, Ujifsa, Grant and Matthews, Douglas, The Almanac of American Politics, 1976 (New York: Dutton, 1976)Google Scholar. In the case of the 1968 election, it should be noted that using the percentage of Democratic vote in effect separates the Democratic vote from the Nixon–Wallace vote. Such a procedure is justified for two reasons: first, the policy attitudes of Wallace voters in the 1968 election were substantially closer to those of Nixon voters than to those of the Humphrey voters on most domestic and foreign issues; and, secondly, a substantial percentage of Wallace voters in fact opted for Nixon in the subsequent presidential election. Boyd. in ‘Popular Control of Public Policy’, shows that on increased federal role in medical care, education, civil rights, the use of force to deal with urban unrest, and withdrawal from Vietnam, those responding in a conservative direction comprised 39 per cent of Democratic presidential voters as compared with 71 per cent of the Nixon voters and 69 per cent of the Wallace voters. On the behaviour of Wallace voters in the subsequent 1972 elections, see Miller, et al. , ‘A Majority Party in Disarray’, pp. 771–3.Google Scholar

16 Recent examples are Jackson, John E., Constituencies and Leaders in Congress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974)CrossRefGoogle ScholarSinclair, Barbara Deckard, ‘Political Upheaval and Congressional Voting: The Effects of the 1960s on Voting Patterns in the House of Representatives’, Journal of Politics, XXXVIII (1976), 326–45.Google Scholar

17 Data on these demographic and economic variables for the individual districts are drawn from US Bureau of the Census, Congressional District Data Book (Washington, D.C., 1963)Google Scholar; US Bureau of the Census, Congressional District Data Book, Supplements (Washington, D.C., 1965)Google Scholar; US Bureau of the Census, Congressional District Data Book (Washington, D.C., 1973)Google Scholar; Barone, et al. , Almanac of American Politics, 1972Google Scholar. As there exist several standard measures of urbanization, we initially employed three and report in this research the results from the measure most strongly correlated with the main dependent variable of the study, the House members' liberal and conservative roll-call scores. This measure is the percentage of the district's population residing in central cities.

18 Turner, Julius, Party and Constituency, revised edition by Schneier, Edward L. Jr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Clausen, Aage R., How Congressmen Decide: A Policy Focus (New York: St Martin's Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Matthews, Donald and Stimson, James, ‘Decision-Making by U.S. Representatives’, in Ulmer, S. Sydney, ed., Political Decision-Making (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970).Google Scholar

19 Clausen, Aage, How Congressmen Decide.Google Scholar

20 States included in each region are the same as in Clausen, Aage and Cheney, Richard B., ‘A Comparative Analysis of Senate-House Voting on Economic and Welfare Policy, 1953–1964’, American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 138–52, p. 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Martin, Jeanne, ‘Presidential Elections and Administration Support Among Congressmen’, American Journal of Political Science, XX (1976), 483–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buck, J. Vincent, ‘Presidential Coattails and Congressional Loyalty’, Midwest Journal of Political Science, XVI (1972), 460–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flinn, Thomas A. and Wolman, Harold, ‘Constituency and Roll Call Voting: The Case of the Southern Congressmen’, Midwest Journal of Political Science, X (1966), 192–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Schwarz, John E. and Fenmore, Barton, ‘Presidential Election Results and Congressional Roll Call Behaviour: The Cases of 1964, 1968 and 1972’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, II (1977), 409–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Flinn, and Wolman, , ‘Constituency and Roll Call Voting’.Google Scholar

24 Conservative coalition support (opposition) scores are based on the percentage of times members voted with (or against) the conservative coalition when it formed on the floor. By definition, the conservative coalition forms whenever a majority of Republicans and of Southern Democrats vote together against a majority of Northern Democrats.

25 The Gallup polls used were within six months of the respective elections, or otherwise closest to the elections, for which the response choice categories given were ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’ and ‘no opinion’ or ‘don't know’. The figures we present divide those having no opinion or ‘don't know’ according to the percentages of persons identifying themselves as conservative and liberal. Where more than one poll was available, results for the polls are averaged.

26 See fn. 1 and fn. 2 above.