THE EFFECTS OF ELECTORAL SECURITY AND LEGISLATIVE POSITION ON THE ALLOCATION OF TIME BY CONGRESSMEN

Describing how representatives allocate their time to activities in Washington and between Washington and the district, and determining why representatives allocate their time in the manner they do, are the central concerns of the study. The major hypotheses of the study are: (1) Electoral Security determines how a legislator allocates time between Washington and the district and among various activities in Washington; (2) A member's legislative responsibilities determine how much time is allocated among various activities in Washington and between Washington and the district. The research design employed is a quasi-experiment using cross-sectional as well as longitudinal analysis. An examination of the electoral security hypothesis indicates that in most instances electoral security has little impact on the time allocation decisions made by congressmen. An examination of the relationship between behavior and legislative position indicate that, with two exceptions, legislative position is not an important factor in explaining time allocation decisions made by congressmen. These results run counter to theoretical expectations which suggest that members make choices about how they allocate their time based upon their Washington careers and electoral security. Two explanations seem possible. The first explanation assumes that members have both reelection and policy goals. The argument is that reforms of the last decade have raised decision costs and made life in the legislative arena more difficult and the pursuit of policy goals less possible. Because the high costs of decision making have wiped out the advantages of safety and position one no longer observes behavioral differences between safe and unsafe members or between chairmen and nonchairmen in respect to their allocation of time. The second explanation suggests that the assumption that members have both reelection and policy goals is erroneous. Members only pursue the former goal, and pursue it in the most convenient arena. Therefore, there are no tradeoffs in how members allocate their time because they only have policy goals in order to get reelected. If there are no tradeoffs in how members allocate their time, then there is no reason to expect that safe members and subcommittee chairmen will behave any differently than their colleagues.