The Learning of Legislative Norms

Abstract

The paper focuses on the learning of legislative norms on the part of freshman members elected to the United States House of Representatives in November, 1968. Since a research interest in learning is a longitudinal concern, a two-page panel design was employed, the first set of interviews conducted in late January and February of 1969 and the second set the following May. As the concept of a norm involves the notion of shared expectations, a sample of the nonfreshman members of the 91st Congress was also interviewed. The main finding of the paper is that the amount of norm learning was surprisingly low; it appeared that freshmen largely knew the general House norms prior to entering Congress. And the extent of attitude change toward the norms once in office was minimal. Freshmen and nonfreshmen generally expressed similar attitudes toward the norms. Support for the norm of apprenticeship was found to be weak, suggesting the need to revise the traditional image of the freshman representative.