The Socialization To Partisan Legislative Behavior: an Extension of Sinclair's Task Force Socialization Thesis

• DOI: 10.1177/106591298804100211
• Author: James C. Garand
• Published date: 01 June 1988
• Date: 01 June 1988
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE SOCIALIZATION TO PARTISAN LEGISLATIVE
BEHAVIOR: AN EXTENSION OF SINCLAIR’S TASK
FORCE SOCIALIZATION THESIS
JAMES C. GARAND
Louisiana State University
N
recent years numerous scholars and political analysts have noted
the decline since the turn of the century in the ability of House leaders
to fashion legislative majorities on issues of importance to the majority
party. The most recent explanations of such patterns have focused on
the changing institutional environment facing House leaders, the result
of which has been a shift from hierarchial patterns of leadership style
to a bargaining pattern more appropriate to the current decentralized
House of Representatives (Cooper and Brady 1981).
One strategy developed as part of the shift toward a bargaining leader-
ship style has been referred to as the strategy of inclusion (Sinclair 1981;
Loomis 1984). Such a strategy has emphasized the importance of includ-
ing rank-and-file party members in the decision-making processes previ-
ously left only to party leaders, committee and subcommittee chairs, and
senior members. During the late 1970s, one manifestation of the strategy
of inclusion used systematically by Speaker Thomas O’Neill was the
Speaker’s task force, described in detail by Sinclair (1981, 1983). A
Speaker’s task force is defined as &dquo;an ad hoc group appointed by the
Speaker and charged with passage of a specific bill&dquo; (Sinclair 1981: 397).
According to Sinclair, task forces have two primary goals: (1) the short-
term goal of building a majority coalition on specific bills deemed by the
leadership as central to the majority party’s legislative agenda, and
(2) socialization of rank-and-file party members to partisan and &dquo;follower-
ship&dquo; norms. Focusing on the short-term goal of coalition building, Sin-
clair found that the limited use of the task force mechanism has paid
handsome dividends: on the 14 major (controversial) issues for which
a task force was created from 1977 to 1979, the legislation passed with
both House chamber and Democratic party majorities.
The impact of Speaker’s task forces on the socialization of rank-and-
file Democratic House members to partisan and/or followership norms
has received less attention. Sinclair (1983) found that task force mem-
bers exhibit higher mean levels of party support than non-members,
Received: March 5, 1987
First Revision Received: June 26, 1987
Accepted for Publication: July 10, 1987
NOTE: I am
indebted to Professor Barbara sinclair for providing me with copies of her task
force membership data, without which this analysis would not have been possible. In
addition, I am grateful to Michele Rome and Brent Bourgeois for their invaluable as-
sistance in data collection and coding, and to Julie DeJean for her able typing assistance.
The interpretations found in this paper are my own, and I remain responsible for any
remaining errors contained herein.

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though this bivariate analysis did not take into account other factors that
might explain such differences. Garand and Clayton (1986) developed
a multivariate model of
the impact of task force membership on individual
party support levels for 1977 to 1979, and their findings provide strong
confirmation for the socialization hypothesis suggested by Sinclair. More
specifically, Garand and Clayton found that a substantial selection bias
exists for task force membership: that is, task force members tend to be
selected from among those who exhibit higher initial levels of party sup-
port. However, even when these previous levels of party support are taken
into account, task force membership is found to have a significant im-
pact on current levels of party support. In fact, participation on a task
force increases the party support levels of junior House Democrats be-
tween 7 percent and 10 percent, even after controlling for the impact
of other variables. In addition, consistent with the socialization hypothe-
sis, Garand and Clayton found that sensitivity to task force membership
is an inverse function of seniority; the coefficient for an interaction vari-
able between task force membership and seniority is negative, indicat-
ing that the impact of task force membership on party support levels
declines as seniority increases. All in all, Garand and Clayton have uncov-
ered strong evidence in support of Sinclair’s task force socialization
hypothesis.
Despite this strong supporting evidence, several important issues per-
taining to the scope of the task force socialization thesis remain un-
resolved. Primarily, the task force membership variable employed by
Garand and Clayton in their party support models was measured as a
dummy variable, coded 1 if a House Democrat is a task force member
either during the current year or in preceding years. Such a specification
of the primary independent variable may hide substantial variation in both
task force membership and its effects on party support levels. For instance,
both Sinclair (1981) and Garand and Clayton (1986) have noted that there
is substantial variation in the number of task force memberships held by
individual House Democrats. Since the task force membership variable
utilized by Garand and Clayton aggregated various levels of task force
membership into a single dichotomous measure for each year in the anal-
ysis,...