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CHAPTER 1
Legislative Style and Congressional Careers
There are two kinds of Congressmen — show horses and work horses. If you want to get your name in the papers, be a show horse. If you want to gain the respect of your colleagues, keep quiet and be a work horse. — Senator Carl Hayden's recollection of the advice given to him as a new legislator, as quoted by Matthews (1960, 94)
Upon arriving on Capitol Hill, all new members of Congress (MCs) face a central choice: What kind of legislator will they be? This is not a trivial task, as the available opportunities for investment of time, effort, and resources are numerous. What, for example, is the right balance between working in the district and on Capitol Hill? Will they be policy specialists, focusing on a particular issue; policy generalists, active in a number of areas; or will they avoid investing in policy making altogether? Should they toe the party line or chart their own courses? With whom should they collaborate and form coalitions? Should they seek to develop a national reputation by giving speeches and cultivating the media? What is the "right" amount of time to spend raising money, and what should they do with those funds once they have collected them?
Together, such decisions define an MC's "legislative style." These styles are fundamental to understanding individual legislators' behavior and aggregate dynamics within the House of Representatives. Styles shape the quality of representation constituents receive, the scope and content of the policy legacies legislators leave, and the trajectories MCs' careers take in the chamber and beyond.
We contend that legislators adopt styles that align with their ambitions, past experiences, and personal inclinations, as well as the electoral and institutional constraints they face. Put simply, MCs differ from one another. Some aspire to leadership positions within the chamber, others are content to be part of the rank and file, and still others view the House as a way station en route to other office. Some care intensely about policy and some do not. Some view their primary role as district servants, while others believe that their efforts should be focused on building their party, on promoting a cause, or on passing legislation. These differences shape the choices and trade-offs legislators make in their activities in office, and, hence, in the styles they display as they build their careers.
Consider, for example, the two Ohio Republicans first elected to the House of Representatives in 1990 (the 102nd Congress) — John Boehner and David Hobson. Boehner and Hobson had some similarities — both were born and raised in Ohio, both had military and business experience, and both had served in the state legislature. However, it was apparent from the beginning that their approaches to congressional life were quite different. Hobson was mostly content to use his position to address issues of interest to his district, particularly the concerns of military families (eventually rising to chair of the Military Construction Subcommittee of Appropriations), and he preferred to work behind the scenes on policy matters with the Republican leadership. In describing his choice to bypass press attention and interviews, Hobson said, "That isn't my style. ... I'm not doing this to build Dave Hobson into a national name" (Barone and Cohen 2001, 1208). That outlook characterized Hobson's long (and largely under the radar) service in the House, from the time of his arrival in January 1991 until his retirement in 2008.
Boehner, in contrast, quickly became known as a "partisan firebrand" (Barone and Ujifusa 1993, 1003) who "in his first term made far more impact than just about any minority party freshman in memory" (1005). Among other initiatives, Boehner pushed for revealing the names of members caught up in the House bank scandal, and he worked with Newt Gingrich on the foundations of what would become the "Contract with America." In 1994, these efforts would help to elevate Republicans to the majority for the first time in decades. Boehner's political skill and ambition were immediately evident; by his third term in office, he had risen in the hierarchy to become House Republican Conference Chairman, the fourth-ranking Republican in the chamber. He would continue to climb the leadership ladder, becoming House Majority Leader, House Minority Leader, and eventually Speaker of the House before resigning from that position, and from his House seat, in 2015.
It is clear from even these brief descriptions that Hobson and Boehner had different goals, different ways of approaching their work, and, hence, different styles. Our goal in this book is to capture legislators' stylistic differences in a systematic way. We argue first that styles extend beyond behavior on a single dimension of congressional activity, and instead are holistic in nature. They reflect the entirety of MCs' choices across the myriad opportunities available to them. Second, we view MCs' individual patterns of behavior as distinctive and characteristic, signaling what they "are like" as legislators. Importantly, though, MCs are not each unique. There are a few common paths to Congress, a handful of different role orientations, and a finite number of possible career goals within and beyond the chamber. As a result, we expect legislators' behavior to cohere into a small set of recognizable styles. In other words, there will be a number of other "Boehners" and "Hobsons" in the House of Representatives. We anticipate that styles will be consistent (though not entirely unchanging) for individuals across time and with a similar distribution across congresses.
Our gestalt view of legislative behavior is not new. The idea of legislative style has its roots in the very earliest empirical work on congressional politics, and it is commonplace among MCs themselves to refer to the various "types" that inhabit the halls of Congress. For example, Tom DeLay (R-TX), the Republicans' Whip and then Majority Leader from 1995 to 2006, often asserted that there were "three kinds of congressmen" — leadership MCs (who "aimed to spend their careers governing the House and their colleagues"), committee MCs (who "took up residence in a particular outpost ... and made it their fiefdom"), and district MCs (who devoted their time and effort to cultivating their constituencies) (Draper 2012, 15).
However, our approach is in direct contrast to most current research on legislative activity, which tends to focus in depth on a single behavior at a time (e.g., roll call voting or the introduction of legislation or campaign fund-raising). While the benefits of such specialization are many, the downside is that we lack a comprehensive understanding of how MCs approach their jobs as legislators, the manner in which these choices are manifested in their activity in office, and whether this type of strategizing yields electoral, policy, and career dividends for them. In fact, we contend that congressional scholars know more about what MCs are like as representatives (building on the work of Fenno 1978, Grimmer 2013, and others) than as legislators.
In what follows, we offer an account of congressional careers centering on the origins, evolution, and effects of legislative style. Our analyses focus on MCs who served in the 101st–110th Congresses (1989–2008). We derive styles from the behavior of these legislators (1,011 unique members, and 4,276 MC-congress observations), utilizing a new statistical model for clustering analysis. Our results reveal that MCs' activity clusters into five stable and predictable styles: policy specialists, party soldiers, district advocates, party builders, and ambitious entrepreneurs.
Our analyses explore the distribution of styles across MCs and congresses, the factors that influence why a legislator adopts a particular style in his or her freshman term, the evolution of style over individuals' service in the House of Representatives, and the effects of style on MCs' electoral and legislative success and career advancement. This approach offers new insight into a number of enduring questions in legislative politics. We show, for example, that the path to leadership often begins early. John Boehner was distinct from his peers from the start — among the only 6.5% of MCs who adopt a party builder style by their sophomore terms. We also demonstrate that progressively ambitious legislators — those who desire to move up to higher office — tend to make different stylistic choices than their colleagues planning long service in the House. For some MCs, these stylistic choices are apparent from the beginning of their careers. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for instance, began his House service as an ambitious entrepreneur, eventually leaving that chamber behind for a run for the Senate and then the presidency. For others, a shift in style accompanies a change in the opportunity structure that makes a run for the Senate or governorship a viable option. Among this latter group are MCs such as Charles Schumer (D-NY), who had been a party builder, but shifted to the ambitious entrepreneur style during the term leading up to his Senate bid.
Legislative style also offers leverage in explaining the effects of macro-level shocks like shifts in majority control and the growth of partisan and ideological polarization on legislative behavior. Changes that make congressional service more attractive to certain types of current or prospective legislators may also influence the distribution of styles within the chamber. As we demonstrate, a congress full of party soldiers looks different from one populated by policy specialists or district advocates, and the styles adopted by MCs have downstream consequences for representation and policy making, ranging from the amount of attention legislators devote to their districts to the volume of legislation passed into law.
A Brief History of Legislative Styles
Style has a long history in the literature on Congress. As far back as the 1950s, political scientists like Donald Matthews (1959, 1960) invoked the famous "work horse versus show horse" distinction when describing differences across MCs (see also Barber 1965; Clapp 1963; Davidson 1969). Such accounts posit two types of members: those who do the heavy lifting legislatively, toiling in obscurity at the mundane work of making law, and those whose primary aim is self-aggrandizement, seeking publicity at the expense of their legislative responsibilities.
Observations by congressional contemporaries of these scholars buttressed the claims of two distinct styles. In his 1947 memoir, Confessions of a Congressman, Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) contrasted "prepossessed" and influential "members of long service" with another group:
At the other extreme in both the House and the Senate are certain members who play regularly to the galleries and to the press. I soon learned that their influence is vastly less than would appear from a reading of either the Congressional Record or the morning papers. (1947, 32)
Along the same lines, in his autobiography, My First Fifty Years in Politics, former Speaker of the House Joe Martin (R-MA) recalled of his early days in Congress:
In spite of the great reputations, I soon discovered, as new members probably still do, that whenever a particular subject came up, there was always one or perhaps two members who were expert on it and could address themselves to it far more intelligently than anyone else. And very often, these were members that one had never heard of until he came to Congress. (Martin and Donovan 1960, 47–48)
Underlying these descriptions of legislative types is an argument about advancement and congressional careers. Show horses might receive media and public attention, making it more likely that they rise to a Senate seat or beyond, but the real influence and respect accrues to workhorses, enabling them to attain positions of power (formal and informal) within the chamber. As Mayhew (1974) put it, "The hero of the Hill is not the hero of the airwaves. The member who earns prestige among his peers is the lonely gnome who passes up news conferences ... in order to devote his time to legislative 'homework'" (147).
However, despite the frequent discussion of the divide between show horses and work horses, few scholars followed up to explore legislative styles in a systematic way. Perhaps this is because it was taken as self-evident that these two types were sufficient to describe important variation in MC behavior. Another likely reason is that styles are difficult to quantify, and by the 1960s and early 1970s, scholars of legislative behavior and representation had turned to large N statistical analysis as the methodology of choice. This contributed to the rise of studies of roll call voting behavior, beginning with the foundational works of scholars like Miller and Stokes (1963), Fiorina (1974), Kingdon (1973), and Matthews and Stimson (1975), and continuing unabated into the 2000s. Indeed, for many years, the study of legislative activity was the study of roll call voting, with more gestalt depictions of MCs' behavior falling by the wayside.
A notable exception, of course, is Fenno's (1978) work on legislators' relationships with their districts: their "home styles." Fenno argued that to understand MCs, we must consider where they come from. In particular, how do they think about their constituencies and how do they balance the competing demands they face between their districts and their work on Capitol Hill? In Home Style: House Members in Their Districts, he targeted three behaviors of interest — MCs' allocation of resources between the district and DC, their presentations of self, and their explanations of Washington activity — concluding that "each member's amalgam of these three activities — as manifested in the district — constitutes his or her home style" (1978, 33).
For good reason, Home Style remains among the most influential books on representation in the United States. Among its many contributions is that it elucidates the role of MCs' perceptions of their constituencies and their relationships with them in explaining legislative behavior. It is also a masterful illustration of the value of the qualitative "soak and poke" approach to research at which Fenno excelled, demonstrating the value of close observation of MCs at work.
From the perspective of our approach to legislative styles, Fenno's identification of the district as the locus of interest is crucial. When he asks "what are members like?" he means what are they like as representatives. This focus on style as synonymous with communication with (and to) constituents continues to the present (see, for example, Grimmer 2013; Grimmer, Westwood, and Messing 2014). The result is a rich and nuanced accounting of the causes and consequences of legislators' presentations of self and explanations of their activity on Capitol Hill. However, the question of what MCs are like as legislators has received considerably less attention.
There was a brief resurgence of interest in the show horse versus work horse divide in the 1980s, with scholars examining the linkage between media attention and legislative activity. However, evidence largely failed to support the hypothesized inverse relationship between lawmaking and publicity (Langbein and Sigelman 1989; but see Payne 1980). In response, some scholars posited that the growth of television meant that there was no longer a distinction — all MCs were now show horses (Ornstein 1983; Ranney 1983). Others argued that the media had become more sophisticated, granting publicity to those legislators who actually did the heavy lifting (Cook 1988; Hess 1986).
Because these observers were primarily interested in supporting or debunking the show horse/work horse conception itself, or in describing the effects of the media on congressional behavior, they did not seek to offer a new, more accurate, typology of MC style. Meanwhile, scholars of legislative behavior were still largely focused on roll call votes, particularly as measures of MCs' preferences (e.g., Poole and Rosenthal 2007) and, increasingly, on other floor behavior (e.g., Smith 1989). Others, following Fenno, aimed to quantify district attention and constituency service and better understand its effects on MCs' electoral fortunes (Bond 1985; Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987; Johannes 1984; Parker 1986).
The 1990s and 2000s saw the expansion of the study of legislative activity beyond roll call voting. This was due in part to the growing recognition that MCs' votes, while important, did not reflect all dimensions of potential interest. Hall (1996), for example, opened his book on participation in congressional committees by noting:
For every issue that comes before them, there are essentially two decisions that each member of Congress must make: what position to take and how active to be. A rich literature within political science and economics is devoted to the first, exploring the causes and consequences of members' voting decisions in committee and on the floor. By comparison, almost nothing is known about the decisions that members make every day, issue by issue, regarding how much they will participate in the legislative deliberations in their chamber. (1)
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