Content area
Full Text
Congress: The Electoral Connection was an important book when it appeared in 1974, and it remains one 25 years later. One measure of the importance of a work is the research that it stimulates. Mayhew's focus on advertising and credit claiming has led to a good deal of research on these activities, and those who study Congress have learned much from both Mayhew himself and the scholars he inspired. Moreover, analyses of advertising and credit claiming continue to proliferate and have recently been conducted on legislatures outside the United States. His identification of the third electorally-- motivated activity, position taking, has had a more subtle and insidious impact on the study of Congress.
Position Taking and Policy Representation
By emphasizing position taking, Mayhew may have led congressional scholars to discount the value of studies of policy representation. Mayhew's
conceptualization of position taking suggests that nearly every policy-- related activity a member undertakes can be interpreted as symbolic. Analysts have used such disparate activities as members' passage of measures by wide margins and their proposal of measures with full knowledge that they would fail as indicators of symbolic behavior. If no actions fail to qualify as position taking, no hypothesis generated by the theory is falsifiable and any study of members' attempts to represent constituency policy preferences can be dismissed. Under such a theory of legislative behavior, policy representation assumes the character of a pseudoevent.
Because Mayhew did not rank the effects that advertising, credit claiming, and position taking have on members' reelection chances, his book has been widely read to argue that all have similar beneficial effects. Surely, the first two ought to have a uniform appeal to voters throughout a district. Position taking for maximum electoral appeal was understood by many scholars to mean that reelection seekers should take positions at the policy preference of the median voter.1 But constituencies are not necessarily homogeneous with respect to policy preferences, and a great deal of evidence suggests that members of Congress do not locate themselves at the median policy position for their respective districts. And even scholars convinced that position taking is what members do have, to a surprising degree, neglected the question of whether members take positions to influence public opinion in the hopes...