Nelson W. Polsby

The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives

Most people who study politics are in general agreement, it seems to me, on at least two propositions. First, we agree that for a political system to be viable, for it to succeed in performing tasks of authoritative resource allocation, problem solving, conflict settlement, and so on, in behalf of a population of any substantial size, it must be institutionalized. That is to say, organizations must be created and sustained that are specialized to political activity. 1 Otherwise, the political system is likely to be unstable, weak, and incapable of servicing the demands or protecting the interests of its constituent groups. Secondly, it is generally agreed that for a political system to be in some sense free and democratic, means must be found for institutionalizing representativeness with all the diversity that this implies, and for legitimizing yet at the same time containing political opposition within the system. 2 Our growing interest in both of these propositions, and in the problems to which they point, can begin to suggest the importance of studying one of the very few extant examples of a highly specialized political institution which over the long run has succeeded in representing a large number of diverse constituents, and in legitimizing, expressing, and containing political opposition within a complex political system—namely, the U.S. House of Representatives. The focus of my attention here will be first of all descriptive, drawing together disparate strands—some of which already exist in the literature 3 —in an attempt to show in what sense we may regard the House as an institutionalized organ of government. Not all the necessary work has been done on this rather difficult descriptive problem, as I shall indicate. Secondly, I shall offer a number of speculative observations about causes, consequences, and possible lessons to be draw from the institutionalization of the House.

The Growth of the Seniority System in the U.S. House of Representatives

Popular discussions of the internal management of the U.S. House of Representatives in the present era generally give great weight to the ubiquity and arbitrariness of the seniority system as a significant determinant of outcomes there. Careful attention to the scholarly literature, however, should long since have modified this view. For it appears that except for relatively unimportant matters such as the allocation of office space on Capitol Hill, the criterion of seniority is generally intermingled in House decision-making with a great many other crite ria of choice, and the business of choosing is not automatic, but remains in the hands of persons having some considerable discretion. This, apparently, is the case with respect to such decisions as the allocation of Capitol Hill patronage, the initial assignment of Representatives to committees, the distribution of responsibilities within committees, and the choice of party leaders. The one important area in which seniority seems to play a role of overwhelming significance is in the matter of succession to the chairmanship of committees; this is in turn governed by the custom (not a formal rule) of seniority that guarantees members reappointment to committees at the opening of each new Congress, in rank order of committee service. It is the growth of this method of selecting committee chairmen in the House that is the subject of this paper.

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Tracking Changes in the U.S. Senate

The character of the U.S. Senate has changed markedly over the last 30 years. The Senate can no longer be characterized as a well-bounded entity ruled by an “inner club” of insular grandees. Increasingly, rather, the Senate is a great forum, an echo chamber, a theater, where dramas—comedies and tragedies, soap operas and horse operas—are staged to enhance the careers of its members and to influence public policy by means of debate and public investigation. Its special role today in the contemporary American political system is as an incubator of policy ideas and political innovations (Polsby 1984). This stands in dramatic contrast with the Senate as late as the 1950s, which was far more a body that had positioned itself as a critic and a respondent—frequently an inhospitable one—to the political innovations hatched in the executive branch and by activist presidents and forwarded to it by the House of Representatives. Thus over the last three decades the Senate has evolved from a rather negative repository of states-rights thinking, dominated by a mostly southern-led “inner club,” and hence an explicit agent of the devolved aspect of the federal system, into a predominantly nationally-oriented body. The principal agent of this transformation has been the very great change in the life chances and therefore in the political ambitions of a large number of U.S. senators. Earlier, not so many of them entertained presidential ambitions. Today, the Senate is the main institutional source of presidential hopefuls, and for a large fraction of senators such hopes play a significant part in guiding their behavior in the Senate.

Legitimacy in British Policy-making: Functional Alternatives to the Civil Service

Nearly 15 years ago, one of the creators of Yes Minister, seeking to repeat his success in the United States, asked me which department of the US government would be best to use to explore the tensions between a cabinet minister and senior civil servants—the relationship that had worked so well when depicted on British television (Lynn and Jay 1984). I gave him no satisfactory answer because, to my mind, the really interesting tensions in the American system of separated institutions sharing power operate between Congress and the presidency (see Neustadt 1960, 29; C. O. Jones 1994, 1995). He took my point and with a collaborator went off to write a funny and perceptive pilot script. It was nevertheless rejected by the leading American networks, no doubt for reasons anticipated by the late head of BBC television, Sir Huw Wheldon, in his brilliant Dimbleby Lecture of 1976. There was a difference, Sir Huw explained, in the theatrical traditions governing televised material—including situation comedies—in the two countries. In the United States the reigning tradition harks back to vaudeville, Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and is straightforwardly calculated to give pleasure. Hence, of American performances, he said, ‘whether they were sad or whether they were merry, they were there to please you. If you smiled, you smiled with pleasure, and if you cried, you cried with pleasure ... To be inoffensive was not enough, they had positively to please.’ In the United Kingdom, television entertainment by contrast proceeds from ‘the tradition of British literary and dramatic art’. ‘Now if the business of movies is pleasure’, he continued, ‘the business of literature and drama, in

Response to Michael K. Briand

More or less repeating a piece of my talk at the University of Chicago last year, there are a couple of points I wish to make about the Kettering report. 1. Some sort of peer review should have preceded the Foundations massive effort at publicizing the findings of its focus group studies. This peer review might have pointed out that there are standards that apply to the conduct of focus groups and could have found out whether in this case these standards were met. After reading Mr. Briands communication, we still do not know. Until we find out, replication by others will be difficult. 2. The Foundation has it within its resources to convert hypotheses generated by its focus groups into better, more carefully qualified findings, e.g., through the use of survey research, and should have done so. 3. There are good reasons-one or two of which I gave-to wonder if the findings as presented could bear the inferential burden the Foundation and its president were putting on them.

The Reform of Presidential Selection and Democratic Theory

The political science profession is very far indeed from having pronounced its last word on the subject of the reforms of the presidential nomination process which have so dramatically transformed American elections and the party system. The current wave of reform began over a decade ago, and, more or less on schedule, political scientists have now begun regularly to report findings that suggest that they have been incorporating questions about the consequences of these reforms into their research.

17. Nelson W. Polsby. 1968. “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives.” American Political Science Review 62 (March): 144–68. Cited 287 times

I frequently tell my graduate students that a good indicator that a piece of work has attained the status of a classic is the extent to which it is cited irrelevantly. Although I have been vaguely conscious in the years since this article was published that it has turned up in a lot of footnotes, I have not followed its career in the literature closely enough to be able to tell whether by this austere criterion it qualifies.

Systematic Knowledge and Presidential Selection

In the immediate post-World War II era, two remarkable books about American politics were written. One, Inside USA, was an attempt in 979 pages to ‘study ... democracy in action ... to show this most fabulous and least known of countries, the United States of America to itself’ (Gunther, 1947, p. ix). The author, John Gunther, had a reasonable claim to be considered the leading political journalist of his day; his book on the United States was the fourth and most ambitious of his Inside series that took in Europe, Asia and Latin America (Gunther, 1936; Gunther, 1939; Gunther, 1941). It made a splash upon publication, and was warmly received by the review media.1