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In recent Congresses, roughly half of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives served in whip organizations and on party committees. Rank-and-file representatives who use party service to advance their own careers benefit from this growing rate of participation in the party hierarchy, as do the party leaders who use participation in order to advance the party's agenda through coordination, communication, and persuasion. According to Scott R. Meinke, however, rising electoral competition and polarization over the past 40 years have altered the nature of party participation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the participation of a wide range of members was crucial to building consensus. Since then, in the partisan battle for control of the chamber, organizations responsible for coordination in the party have become dominated by those who follow the party line. At the same time, key leaders in the House use participatory organizations less as forums for internal deliberations over policy and strategy than as channels for exchanging information with supporters outside Congress and broadcasting sharply partisan campaign messages to the public. This transformation of leadership organizations generally serves a party's collective goals in an era of close electoral competition and ideological polarization. Yet it also hinders a party's ability to reach a strategic consensus over divisive issues and to develop its own policy alternatives. -- from back cover

A range of research shows that distributive spending is allocated disproportionately to members in positions of power or who contribute to collective efforts. In this article, I ask whether House members who participate in their party caucus' internal organizations enjoy earmarking advantages either as a direct benefit or by avoiding earmarking losses that are usually associated with declining electoral vulnerability. Adding new data on party involvement to several earmarking data sets, I find mixed evidence. Democratic party participants enjoyed somewhat better outcomes in the 1990s, but this result does not hold in other contexts. Evidence from the traditional pork barrel area of transportation earmarks supports the expectation that the electoral vulnerability effect is confined to nonparticipants, but this pattern does not appear for Appropriations earmarks in the 2000s. The results suggest that contributions to party goals can relate to distributive outcomes but that the effects vary by issue and party context.

Objectives. This article explores how House members relate their involvement in partisan Washington activity to constituency representation.Methods. Building on Fenno's familiar conception of home style, I argue that certain House members have an incentive to develop a partisan home style that emphasizes party activity in Washington. I examine this relationship by studying the extended party leadership (party committees and whip networks), looking for connections between member/constituency characteristics and extended leaders' choices to advertise partisan leadership activity on their official websites. Logit models are used to test for relationships between these variables.Results. Members vary widely in whether and how they communicate their partisan activity, with constituency factors, career stage, and majority party status all affecting the choice.Conclusions. House members make strategic choices about incorporating partisan Washington activity into their home style.

The author argues that direct election intensified existing electoral incentives in the early-twentieth-century Senate, shifting the audience for senators' reelection efforts with measurable behavioral consequences. The author examines patterns of bill sponsorship, roll-call participation, and party voting in the decades surrounding the Seventeenth Amendment's ratification, a time when originally elected and originally selected senators served side by side. The author finds evidence of increased sponsorship and participation among originally elected senators. Comparing behavioral patterns before and after the constitutional amendment also reveals other important behavioral shifts toward a mass audience in the post-amendment period, including a tendency to increase constituency bill sponsorship immediately before reelection and a strengthening of the link between state partisanship and senators' party support voting. Adapted from the source document.