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By and large the Congress of the United States has been studied on its own terms, as a somewhat unique political institution. Studies of Congress are usually considered to be important simply because they shed light on an important institution in the American political system. It is true, of course, that Congress is an important policy-making body and does deserve study for that reason. But there is no reason why substantive importance cannot be combined with "importance" in another sense. It is also important, for example, to develop theory within any discipline which will help explain the phenomena under study. Trivial substantive problems can be made interesting because of the theory which they suggest. And because a problem may already be substantively important does not mean that it cannot be made even more significant by theoretical development.As a result of this substantive focus, research on Congress has produced a very rich body of descriptive data on various components of the institution, including its members and leadership, group structure, committees, party systems, organization, and rules and procedures. Studies have also provided generalizations concerning such things as the decentralized decision-making of Congress and the effects of the seniority rule on the distribution of power within the House and Senate. These descriptive data and generalizations may serve as the content to be explained within the context of a theory. As yet there has been very little effort at theory construction concerning Congress. The data are there—their organization and explication remain.

The literature on interest groups is, by and large, either heavily abstract and theoretical or highly concrete and descriptive. There are, on the one hand, several attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the study of interest groups, the major foci being either "the group basis of politics" or "mass society." On the other hand are numerous case-studies which describe in some detail, either for a particular policy or for a particular interest group, relevant political activities which lead to inferred conclusions about the impact that such groups have on the issue or issues. What we lack, and what is needed to raise the study of interest groups to the level of empiricallybased generalization, are studies which collect data and generalize about interest groups using multiple units of analysis.This observation is not meant to depreciate or undervalue the important theoretical and descriptive contributions which have been made in the examination of the role of interest groups in governmental systems. It is simply to state a fact about the literature and to plead for more systematic data collection and empirically-based generalization from which verified propositions about interest groups may emerge.I think there are two major reasons why the literature on interest groups lacks a comparative base. First, many of the concepts which are employed in theories about interest groups are difficult to operationalize for data collection. Such concepts as "cohesion," "access," "resources," etc., represent complex phenomena and would involve a good deal of effort to apply rigorously and empirically.

Academic studies of roll-call voting in Congress have tended to stress two factors: (1) the substantial degree of party cohesion in Congress on most issues, and (2) the importance of constituency factors in explaining deviations from party votes within parties. These studies indicate that party is the single most important predictor of roll-call behavior, and that constituency factors explain most of the deviation from party votes. No such study, however, describes constituency differences between Democrats and Republicans on the national level—that is, inter-party differences on constituency variables as opposed to intra-party differences. We will attempt, in this study, to demonstrate that differences between Democrats and Republicans are not merely a matter of party label or ideology (few really contend otherwise), but that they are rooted in basic differences in the kinds of constituencies from which Democrats and Republicans come. We will then go on to show that these constituency factors are also important in explaining intra-party differences in voting in Congress, but only by way of supporting the hypothesis that party voting patterns reflect constituency differences.The general theory underlying this analysis posits gross relationships between sociological variables and political behavior, especially in democratic systems which permit relatively wide latitude in political activity. Since shared attitudes about various problems confronting people are often the result of sharing similar environments, and since economic and social environments vary widely in the United States, it is not surprising to find people located in similar environments choosing up sides in similar ways on matters of public policy, and differing with those who do not share the same environment. These effects should be most noticeable in relatively small areas, such as congressional districts.

Political power in Congress, all observers agree, is highly decentralized. The factors chiefly responsible for this are also well known: weak national parties (in the Congress this results in strong constituency ties and weak leadership sanctions over members) and a highly developed division of labor through the committee system. A leadership endowed with few opportunities to punish and reward, coupled with specialization by policy area, inevitably produces an institution with numerous and disparate centers of power. Just as inevitably the politics of such an institution is compounded of persuasion, bargaining, and log-rolling.As weak as the legislative parties are, however, they still provide the major organizing force in Congress. Roll-call vote analyses have demonstrated this, and a recent study of the House Whip organizations also bears it out. Generally speaking, the single most important variable explaining legislative outcomes is party organization.