Congressional Turnover and the Election of Women

Abstract

IMPORTANT societal institutions typically change only very gradually over time both in terms of their composition and (not coincidentally) in terms of their operating and their decisions. Sociologists such as Pareto and Mosca described the process by which the ruling in various societies are altered in composition as elite circulation. In a relatively stable democratic society such as the United States, elections have been viewed as, among other things, a means to assure that this circulation of elites proceeds in a gradual, peaceful manner, resulting in a more or less pluralistic apportionment of power among social groups at any given point in history. One important assumption of this view is that institutions such as Congress, state legislatures, school boards, or city councils are structured in such a way as to allow rapid turnover in personnel. This assumption must be met if new social groups are to have any chance of achieving even a moderate level of representation. Yet there is evidence that democratic rules of the game (equal and easy access to the ballot, universal suffrage, frequent elections) may not always be sufficient to ensure that the assumption of openness or high turnover is met. In particular and in the example on which we shall focus in this paper recent studies have documented a decreasing amount of personnel turnover in the U.S. Congress as incumbency (for reasons which are not agreed upon) appears to confer an increasingly greater electoral advantage. (See, for example, Erickson 1971; Ferejohn 1977; Fiorina 1977; Kostroski 1973; Mayhew 1974.) Jones (1977) and others have documented the decline of competitve House of Representative seats from 1914 through the seventies.' A striking measure of this change is the following: between 1861 and 1881, each newly elected House had a majority of members serving their first terms; in the middle of this century each new House had only about 15 percent first-termers. Clearly one implication of this is that Congress as an institution is resistant to the type of social change which might bring new groups, such as women or blacks, into political prominence. In the present paper, then, we are interested in a general phenomenon, i.e., the rate at which social or political institutions change (in terms