The Legislator as Specialist

• Author: Leroy C. Ferguson,Heinz Eulau,William Buchanan,John C. Wahlke
• Date: 01 September 1960
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296001300306
• Published date: 01 September 1960
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE LEGISLATOR AS SPECIALIST*
WILLIAM BUCHANAN, University of Southern California
HEINZ EULAU, Stanford University
LEROY C. FERGUSON, Michigan State University
JOHN C. WAHLKE, Vanderbilt University
HROUGHOUT
AMERICAN SOCIETY and government, specialization
in the division of labor and authority is now the rule. One would suppose,
JL therefore, that members of legislative bodies - the persons principally
charged with making authoritative decisions for the society and government -
would have been forced by the increasing complexity of the problems they face
to devise an appropriate system of specialization. If any such system, going beyond
the long-established structure of standing committees, has developed, then a
description of it and of the way it works should be relevant to the understanding
of the modern legislative process. Most summary studies of Congress treat special-
ization only incidentally.’ Yet Matthews’ recent interviews with United States
senators indicate that they recognize and defer to the specialists among them, and
that this habit is useful in getting their job done.2 Truman and Finer, in more
generalized studies of the legislative process, note the occasional relevance of
particular substantive information to legislators’ performance of their duties.3
However, neither seriously challenges the prevailing conception that the main
bodies of special &dquo;subject matter&dquo; knowledge lie almost entirely outside the legisla-
tive halls, and must be revealed and interpreted to legislators, rather than known
or interpreted by them to one another.
The denial that specialization is appropriate in the legislative process is
supported by long-standing assumptions about the functions and desired behavior
of law-makers. Consideration of technical problems has been associated with the
kind of &dquo;detailed&dquo; regulation deemed more fitting for administrative agencies. It
has commonly been thought proper for legislators to perform, instead of such
&dquo;administrative&dquo; chores, other functions more closely related to broad policy
* This study was made possible by grants from the Political Behavior Committee of the Social
Science Research Council. Mr. Eulau’s work was facilitated by a fellowship at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; Mr. Ferguson received assistance from the
Governmental Research Bureau and the All-University Research Fund of Michigan State;
Mr. Wahlke from the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences of Vanderbilt; Mr. Bu-
chanan from the University of Southern California. Neither the Council nor these institu-
tions, of course, are responsible for the study.
1
Incidental instances of specialization may be found in George B. Galloway, The Legislative
Process in Congress (New York: Crowell, 1955), p. 315; Roland Young, The American
Congress (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 107; Stephen K. Bailey and Howard D. Samuel,
Congress at Work (New York: Holt, 1952), pp. 203, 342 ff.; Bertram M. Gross, The Legisla-
tive Struggle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), p. 388. Holbert N. Carroll, The House of
Representatives and Foreign Affairs (Pittsburgh: University Press, 1958), pp. 274-276.
2
Donald R. Matthews: "The Folkways of the United States Senate: Conformity to Group Norms
and Legislative Effectiveness," American Political Science Review, LIII (December, 1959),
1064-89.
3
David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 334; Herman Finer,
The Theory and Practice of Modern Government (New York: Holt, 1949), pp. 382, 446.
636

---

637
decisions: compromise, adjustment, integration of conflicting goals and values.4
4
Related notions include the assumed omnicompetence of the legislator and its
corollary, the theoretical equality of all members of the chamber. These are
embodied in the structural features and common practices of legislative bodies -
equality of voting power, reliance on administrative or interest-group experts to
explain complex matters, reliance on staff experts and committee secretaries to
lead in cross-examining these experts. Indeed, legislatures have often delegated
their rule-making power to independent commissions, reluctantly choosing to
divest themselves of some of their authority rather than to develop the expertise
necessary to maintain it.
The familiar legislative device which facilitates specialized consideration of
substantive matters, and thus counteracts the accepted principle of generalization
is, of course, the standing committee. But even committees are denied the formal
authority that might accompany their specialized responsibility. They remain in
theory representative of the whole house; their purpose is ostensibly economy of
attention; their decisions are revocable by a bare majority. It is by tradition and
informal agreement that their authority is in fact recognized and their decisions
only occasionally overridden. It is also by informal acceptance that committees
have come to be organized as mechanisms for developing and authenticating
specialists, through the practice of recognizing seniority within the committee
(a convention which puts at the head of the committee the majority member
who, while not always best informed on subject-matter, is at least the longest
exposed to information about it).
Of course, the constitution of legislative bodies makes practically impossible
any explicit attempt to recruit or to develop specialists among the membership.
One source of expert knowledge is prior training and experience. No mechanism
exists to bring a person with such qualifications into a district electoral campaign
at the moment the legislative body needs his particular brand of knowledge. If
by accident such an individual enters the electoral contest, the legislature’s need
for him in no way helps him to win the election. If by further coincidence he
should happen to win, he may yet have to wait for accumulating seniority or a
shift in party fortunes to gain the committee post best providing access to his area
of specialty. Finally, after he has been trained, recruited, and given power by
some
such series of happy accidents, his local constituency may choose to cut him
off in his prime on some quite irrelevant ground -
or perhaps the relevant but
perverse ground that he spends too much time on larger affairs and not enough
on local ones.
Between the structure that inhibits specialization and the philosophy that
denies its value, or at the least ignores its relevance, we should expect specialists
to arise only when they are badly needed. In the House of Representatives this
seems principally to be the foreign policy area. Both Dahl and Carroll describe
the crucial role of the &dquo;bellwether&dquo; -
the member who, though he may occupy
4
See Finer, op. cit., Part IV; Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy (rev.
ed.; Boston: Ginn, 1946), chap. 16.

---

638
no formal office, possesses the reputation for understanding some particular inter-
national problem or area and is watched by others seeking cues as to the position
they should take on issues in this area.5 The bellwether, Dahl says, is &dquo;one whom
his colleagues regard as relatively more ’expert’ than they, and yet sufficiently akin
to them to be trustworthy.&dquo; He acts as a communication link: &dquo;Just as one func-
tion of Congress, taken as a whole, is to mediate between the non-expertness of
the citizen and the expertness of the executive-administrative branch, so one func-
tion of the Congressional policy specialist is to mediate between the non-experts
in Congress and the experts on fact and policy in the executive-administra-
tive....&dquo; 6
The expert describes the consequences of proposed actions, Dahl says. He
&dquo;interprets reality&dquo; and formulates the alternative ways a decision might influence
the course of events, given this reality. The non-expert decision-maker, on the
other hand, tends to see alternatives in the light of values -
his own or his con-
stituents.’ Foreseeing, with the expert’s help, the consequences of some policy
these values suggest, he is able to clarify his preferences and choose between the
relevant alternatives. &dquo;Thus the function of the specialist at any point in the line
is to define preferences to the more specialized at the ’higher’ level of competence,
and to define reality to the less specialized at the lower level.&dquo; The Foreign Re-
lations Committee defines congressional preferences to President and State De-
partment, and in turn helps to define to the members of Congress the world in
which their preferred policies must survive. At the next level the non-expert
congressman helps the committee to understand what his constituents want,
and then describes to his constituents the reality he has learned from committee’
members. &dquo;Some such policy of ’translating’ preferences and reality views at
different levels is indispensable to the functioning of most modern organizations.
In complicated situations requiring group organization it is usually the only way
by which human purposes can be achieved.&dquo; 7
In the broader context of any &dquo;decisional system&dquo; (executive, legislative,
or non-governmental) Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin have described the function of
such a mechanism as conveying &dquo;information regarding the state of the relation-
ship of the system to its setting&dquo; so that the decision-makers may have a &dquo;current
picture of the success or failure of their actions and the relative adequacy of the
...