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37 Legis. Stud. Q. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/lgvessqy37 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction As always, the studies presented in this issue of the Quarterly represent the best and most advanced work in the field. But what may be the most interesting aspect about this collection is their cleverness in tackling questions of interest and the considerable variation in their methodological approaches. Sociological studies of the U.S. Congress fell out of fashion several decades ago. Since then scholars have occasionally concerned them- selves with a member's race, ethnicity, or sex, but not with other social or economic characteristics. In this issue of the Quarterly, Nicholas Carnes resurrects this neglected line of research with an analysis of how members' social class backgrounds are related to their legislative voting behavior. Exploiting biographical data, Carnes codes a U.S. House mem- ber's occupational background into one of seven categories: farm owners, businesspeople, private sector professionals such as doctors and architects, lawyers, politicians, service-based professionals such as teachers, and workers. Interestingly, Carnes finds that the proportion of members from each group changed remarkably little over the course of the twentieth century. He hypothesizes that members drawn from the ranks of workers will be the most liberal House members on economic issues while those from profit-oriented occupations will be more con- servative. Carnes tests these notions using both first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores (for the years 1901 to 1996), and AFL-CIO scores (for the years 1973 to 1992). Overall, the results demonstrate that social class as represented by occupation exerts a strong independent effect on roll-call voting in the House in the expected direction, with important implications for concerns about democratic representation for poorer Americans. But it is important to note that the study also makes a strong case for reintroducing sociological orientations into legislative studies. The concept of representation is central to the study of legislative institutions, and in recent years there has been considerable work on the question of how well women are represented in Congress. In a sophisti- cated study, John D. Griffin, Brian Newman, and Christina Wolbrecht advance our understanding of fundamental relationships in this regard. Exploiting the large number of cases available in the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys, they explore how well women LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXVII, 1, February 2012 1 DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-9162.2011.00032.x © 2012 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

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