How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change (review)

If I did not know Polsby better, I would guess from having read this appealing recent book that he had received all of his ideas from Newt Gingrich. Consider the following exchange between them that Polsby dates back to an interview from the early 1990s:

Gingrich. Literally, when you go across the South, it is astonishing the immigration that is going on. Even in places in Mississippi: Biloxi and Pascagoula and those places. . . .

Polsby. You date that from when?

Gingrich. The immigration began with the invention of air conditioning. . . . It is three big things. It is the impact of air conditioning. It is the extraordinary impact in the South of the best parts of the New Deal—REA, TVA, that sort of thing. And it is the intelligent use by Vinson and Russell and other southerners of World War II government industrial build-up to insure that a lot of it happened in the South.

(100)

Polsby has described an odyssey, actually two odysseys—that of Congress as an institution over the course of the seventy-five years from Rep. Sam Rayburn's rise to power to the end of the twentieth century, and that of Polsby himself as a scholar for nearly half a century. This review deals chiefly with the former, but many readers may find stimulating and absorbing the intellectual history of Congressional studies, c. 1960 to 1990, in which Polsby figured prominently, found woven into the narrative of these pages (as well as in the especially informative notes).

In a nutshell, the argument is that exogenous technological change—air conditioning—had social ramifications, especially in the South. It made year-round living in this region manageable, if not attractive, and set into motion the movement of (disproportionately Republican) retirees from the Northeast and the Upper Midwest to southern climes. This relocation generalized and accelerated into a massive shift of manufacturing and white-collar jobs—together with mainly white, mainly northern, relatively wealthy families—to the growing cities of the South (Charlotte, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta). Out-migration, about which Polsby has little to say, reinforces the compositional effect on the electorate. It is a flow mainly of (disproportionately Democratic) African-Americans to the North (only recently and partially reversed, as blacks have begun returning to southern cities).

The compositional effect on the electorate had consequences for political elites. It invigorated the Republican party in state after state in the South by providing it prospective voters, campaign workers and contributors, and quality candidates. As formerly solidly Democratic state delegations in Congress became increasingly Republican, the Democrats in Congress were liberated from their multiple-personality image that pre-dated World War II and began looking increasingly like a homogenous, purposeful, political organization (instead of the mish-mash described famously by Will Rogers as "no organized political party"). "Without the rise of the Republican Party in the South, the consolidation of the House Democratic caucus into an instrument of mainstream Democratic liberalism could not have happened" (111). Thus, exogenous technological change induced compositional change in sectional populations, which, in turn, had an effect at the elite level in the legislature. Technological and social changes are the engines of institutional evolution, adaptation, and response.

The argument as laid out in the previous two paragraphs is lean and linear. Polsby's development of this argument is neither. He draws on the simple statistics of the census, roll-call voting data, and a massive body of ethnographic materials (mainly interviews of his own and his students', but also the fieldwork and notes of other scholars). He steeps his arguments in a subtle reading of Congressional history and biography. He connects high-water events with others that caused barely a ripple to provide a textured context. He entertains and dismisses a number of alternative explanations in masterful social-science style. One aspect of the story that might also have merited a few pages is the Senate. Polsby might, for instance, have set the intellectual table...