Home Style

"He draws a picture, which varies at times, of how Congressmen behaved in the House and what he knew about procedures and forms of behaviour in the House – and ‘home style’, which is what they are like once they get on a plane or the train to go back to their constituencies. And he points out that any successful American politician kind of has to have a House style and a home style but they are utterly unrelated. I chose this book for three reasons: firstly, it’s a really accessible, interesting academic book, and frankly there are too few of those and for that reason I think it’s worth reading. I wish there were more academic books written by Fenno. It’s also doing the kind of research that we don’t do enough of. He spent years hanging out with politicians, watching what they do, how they behave, and we don’t do enough of that academic work. And the third reason I’m interested in it is that when he wrote that book, the sort of stuff he’s talking about would not have been recognised, particularly in Britain. It is recognised now. British politicians have a much more clearly defined home style, which, for the more recent MPs is taking up about half of their time. They spend about half of their time, the new MPs, either in or working for their constituencies. Now there are some good points about this and there are bad points but, actually, we don’t know very much about it. We know quite a lot about how MPs behave in the House; we know almost nothing about how they behave in their constituencies – what they do with their time and then whether it matters. We think it matters but maybe not electorally or at least as much as they think. But in terms of generating good will amongst the constituents – does any of this matter or is it a big waste of time.? My conclusion is that it probably has much less impact. Electorally, there is relatively little evidence that it has a huge impact on the vote."