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This article offers another perspective on the electoral advantage of incumbents in House elections. The explanation (or theory) builds on the contributions of Richard Fenno, Morris Fiorina, David Mayhew, and Anthony Downs. The basic premise is that the electoral advantage enjoyed by House incumbents is a function of their ability to focus constituent attention on aspects of their job performance, or characteristics related to job performance, that produce favorable impressions of their overall performance. Incumbents are able to focus constituent attention, because they exercise a great deal of control over the dissemination of information about themselves. Since congressional elections are low information contests, the voting decision is reduced to a vote for, or against, change. Voters are likely to vote against change-electoral support for incumbents—because the information they receive about (and from) the incumbent convinces them that their congressman is doing a good job in looking after the interests of the district; they also fear that the challenger might do a worse, rather than a better, job than the incumbent in looking after the district.

This analysis explores the impact of war, unemployment and partisanship on trends in Democratic and Republican preferences. It furthers the discussion of the influence of economic conditions on party choice by exploring the hypothesized relationship in a different context-the influence of economic conditions on party preferences between elections. At election times, party choice is reflected in the two-party vote. In the absence of an election, a surrogate for party choice can be obtained from the distribution of responses to the frequent opinion survey query as to which political party could do the "best job" in running government and solving societal problems ("party preferences"). Trends in these questions reveal that unemployment diminishes Republican preferences (and increases Democratic preferences) while the existence of war exercises no significant influence on party preference.

This paper examines the procedure for selecting committee leaders in the House of Representatives. Since this procedure provides for the election of committee leaders each Congress, membership evaluations of committee chairpersons have become critical in determining committee leadership. Leadership evaluation involves performance and personal appraisal. Performance appraisal reflects membership concern with the func tioning of the committees, whereas personal appraisal entails the application of a more personal set of criteria to the evaluation of committee leaders. The analysis uses two independent data sources: interviews with a random sample of 40 congressional Demo crats during the second session of the Ninety-Fourth Congress, and aggregate data relating to the characteristics of the incumbent committee leaders and the performance of their committees. These data sources complement one another and provide the opportunity for multiple confirmation of the conclusions reached in the analysis. Both the interview and aggregate data establish the centrality of performance concerns, especially leadership fairness, to the evaluation and selection of committee leaders.