BENEFITS RESULTING FROM POLITICAL SCIENCE FIELDWORK: DEVELOPING GOOD CO-WORKER RELATIONSHIPS, INTERPERSONAL SKILLS, CONFIDENCE IN ONE'S ABLITIES, THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE, & CAREER PREFERENCES. THOSE RECIEVING HIGHER LEVELS OF VARIOUS BENEFITS FOUND TO BE STUDENTS WHO SPENT MORE TIME ON THEIR STUDIES, HAD SPECIFIC GOALS FOR THE FIELDWORK EXPERIENCE HAD HIGHER LEVELS OF POLITICAL INTEREST & EXPERIENCE.
On the basis of a Guttman scale developed from interview data, 474 legislators in the states of Calif, NJ, Ohio, & Tenn were classified as 'independents' or 'party men.' The legislators were also classified as 'high' or 'low' in party voting regularity on the basis of the N of times that they had voted with their party on partisan roll-calls. A partisan roll-call was defined as one in which a majority of one party was opposed to a majority of the other party. In 4 out of 8 possible cases (Calif Democrats, NJ Republicans, & both parties in Ohio), there was a clear +r between an attitude of party regularity expressed in the interview & party regularity in voting as recorded in the legislative journals. 2 cases (NJ Democrats & Tenn Republicans) were inconclusive, & in 2 cases (Calif Republicans & Tenn Republicans) there was a -r between attitude & voting. In the latter 2 cases, however, it was possible to present plausible explanations of the -r's on the basis of the pol'al situation in the particular states involved. AA.
This recounting of the experience of the State Legislative Research Project demonstrates that it is possible to weld together a research team whose individual members come to the common task with different theoretical orientations, different substantive concerns, different approaches, and without even prior mutual acquaintance. It points to the benefits accruing from joint effort, and suggests some of the difficulties and costs of collaborative research. It also offers strong evidence that direct interviews with the total populations of many institutionalized political groups are not only feasible but promise to be a powerful weapon in the arsenal of social research. The authors are presently associated, respectively, with Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Michigan State University.
The problem of representation is central to all discussions of the functions of legislatures or the behavior of legislators. For it is commonly taken for granted that, in democratic political systems, legislatures are both legitimate and authoritative decision-making institutions, and that it is their representative character which makes them authoritative and legitimate. Through the process of representation, presumably, legislatures are empowered to act for the whole body politic and are legitimized. And because, by virtue of representation, they participate in legislation, the represented accept legislative decisions as authoritative. But agreement about the meaning of the term "representation" hardly goes beyond a general consensus regarding the context within which it is appropriately used. The history of political theory is studded with definitions of representation, usually embedded in ideological assumptions and postulates which cannot serve the uses of empirical research without conceptual clarification.
