Suchergebnisse

By examining the careers of senators between 1947-1957 (N = 180) through interview, biographical directories, news & magazine stories, & personal correspondence, an analysis was made of age & sex distribution, class origins, race, nationality, religion, educ, occup, & pol'al careers. Findings indicate that a 'typical' senator was a 'late-middle-aged,' UMc, native-born Protestant from a small town, who attended law Sch & spent about 10 yrs in public office before being elected to the Senate. It is concluded that US voters 'seem to prefer candidates who are not like themselves but are what they would like to be,' & that the U & UMc's are 'more pol'ly aware' & thus more likely to enter pol. This collective picture does not disclose the patterning of roles, which in a breakdown discloses 4 distinct career types: 'patrician politicians,' 'amateur politicians,' 'professional politicians,' & 'agitators.' P. D. Montagna.

The Senate of the United States, we are told, is a "club." The image, while hopelessly imprecise and occasionally quite misleading, does have at least one advantage: it underscores the fact that there are unwritten but generally accepted and informally enforced norms of conduct in the chamber. These folkways influence the behavior of senators to a degree and in directions not yet fully understood. "There is great pressure for conformity in the Senate," one member (mercifully varying the simile) has recently said. "It's just like living in a small town." And, as in small-town life, so too in the Senate there are occasional careers to be made out of deliberate nonconformity, sometimes only skin-deep, but sometimes quite thorough-going.

Unwritten but generally accepted & informally enforced norms of conduct exist in the US Senate. These folkways hold that new members ought to serve an unobtrusive apprenticeship, that all members should devote a major share of their time & energy to the strictly legislative aspect of their jobs, that Senators should specialize in a few areas of policy, that Senators should be emotionally devoted to the Senate & its ways The Senate could not operate with its present org & rules without these folkways. However, not all Senators adhere to them. A distinguished pre-Senate career, higher pol'al ambitions, constituency problems & a `liberal' pol'al ideology all encourage non-conformity. Senators who conform to the folkways are rewarded by high peer group esteem & tend to be more 'effective' legislators than non-conformists. IPSA.

Based on his forthcoming work entitled, "United States Senators and their world.".