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Chapter 4 Congress as Workplace: The Production of Marketable Human Capital
- University of Michigan Press
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63 Chapter 4 Congress as Workplace: The Production of Marketable Human Capital In analyzing the organization of legislatures, scholars have highlighted a number of important characteristics, including susceptibility to decentralization (Weingast 1979), accent on retention (Mayhew 1974; Fiorina 1989; Parker 1992), and capacity to constrain opportunistic behavior (Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Weingast and Marshall 1988). But lost in these illuminating, ‹rmlike comparisons is the fact that legislatures, like ‹rms, supply training in conjunction with the production of goods, such as laws. And the experiences that go hand in hand with lawmaking are matchless: trading votes, becoming informed about legislative practices and procedures (for example, legislative earmarks, killer amendments, logrolling), gaining expertise in policy matters, developing personal relationships with high-ranking government of‹cials, and deriving ‹rsthand knowledge from hands-on opportunities to formulate legislation (for example, committee markups, pork barreling), to name a few. Given the panoply of skills acquired through legislative service, Congress is, among other things, a workplace for the production of human capital. Legislatures, then, provide settings whereby politicians acquire esoteric information, skills, and experiences as by-products of their involvement in lawmaking. As one ex-legislator, re›ecting on his training in Congress, wrote at the end of his survey: “10 years in Congress was a Ph.D. in people, issues, and management. It was the big leagues—if you didn’t like the sight of blood, especially your own, you couldn’t compete.” Although many scholars see legislative activities as exclusively serving electoral goals, dedicated to promoting collective goods, or focused on internal career ambitions, we believe that there is more to congressional service than that. Speci‹cally, the experiential learning that goes on in Congress also incorporates the formation of pro‹table human capital. By coupling training with lawmaking, then, Congress ensures that legislators derive marketable human capital from their everyday legislative experiences. This is a latent function of many political institutions. In this chapter, we examine on-the-job training in Congress and the skills it imparts. We start by brie›y identifying some categories of marketable human capital. We then describe the legislative activities that impart this capital —in particular, the general training that occurs through service in Congress . Next, we discuss how congressional committees supplement this human capital with specialized and general training. Such information is part and parcel of the capital legislators derive from training in congressional politics . In the ‹nal sections, our attention shifts to the forces that in›uence legislator investments in on-the-job training and affect the breadth of political skills acquired during congressional tenure. Legislators’ Marketable Capital While legislators might merchandise a number of aspects of their congressional training, such as their familiarity with policy issues and bureaucratic agencies, the human capital commonly marketed by legislators falls into three broad categories: contacts inside Congress and the bureaucracy, knowledge of policy questions and the political process, and legislative skills exhibiting political know-how and savvy. We frequently think of legislators obtaining these skills as part of the job, and this may well be true; however, some legislators invest greater amounts of time and effort in acquiring and strengthening their grip on these facets of marketable human capital. We suspect that they do so because they anticipate reaping rewards a cut above those making smaller investments in these same congressional activities. Contacts Investments of human capital in nurturing and cultivating government contacts would seem to be particularly valuable, since legislators can exploit their network of personal friendships—for example, in the federal bureaucracy —to help both constituents and clients. Or they can draw on longstanding personal relationships with other legislators to pave the way for incorporating special interest bene‹ts within legislation. We have assumed that contacts, knowledge, and political skills are equally worthwhile investments , but some observers may disagree. With respect to legislator contacts, for instance, Milbrath (1963) reported that the lobbyists he interviewed were convinced that knowledge of political issues and policy-making processes were more valuable than their governmental contacts. In a similar vein, Heinz and his colleagues (1993, 123) found that lobbyists felt that their CAPITOL INVESTMENTS 64 • [44.198.57.9] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:19 GMT) experiences in Congress were key to understanding issues and decisionmaking processes. We wholeheartedly agree about the signi‹cance of knowledge, but we urge caution before disregarding the relevance of contacts to congressional training, since some of the human capital marketed to special interests incorporates contacts made during of‹ceholding. Such human capital can...