Legislative Learning: The 104^th Republican Freshmen in the House. By Timothy

J. Barnett. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. 333p. $60.00 cloth.

Gregory R. Thorson, University of Minnesota at Morris

The 1994 elections were watershed elections in several respects. Perhaps most significantly, the Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1953. In the process, the 1994 elections also swept into office a large relatively homogeneous group of 73 House Republican freshmen determined to change the political system. With size comes an opportunity for power in Congress, and the 73 Republican freshmen elected in 1994 were determined to exert considerable influence over the legislative process. Not since the 1974 elections produced the 76 freshmen Democrats (i.e. the Watergate Babies) have political scientists focused so much attention on a single class of legislators. Timothy Barnett’s Legislative Learning is a nice complement to similar books already written about this interesting group of legislators, including Richard Fenno and Michael Armacost’s Learning to Govern: An Institutional View of the 104^th Congress and Nicol Rae’s Conservative Reformers: The Republican Freshmen and the Lessons of the 104^th Congress.

Whereas Fenno and Armacost focus on the inexperience and failures of the Republican leadership to adequately develop this new group of legislators, and Rae shares his “insider” experience as an APSA Congressional fellow during this period, Barnett’s primary contribution is finding the theoretical significance to these important historical events. In this respect, he is quite successful. His treatment of the rise and subsequent fall of the Republican freshmen class of 1994 is put into a rich theoretical context that includes extensive discussions of Fenno’s multiple goal approach, ambition theory, and Sinclair’s application of principal-agent theory.

Most of Barnett’s arguments do not defy previous interpretations of the events that took place during this period. For example, most political scientists have long argued that the goals of the Republican freshmen class of 1994 were more policy-oriented than re-election-oriented. Barnett’s treatment is dedicated not so much to determining the factual basis of these claims but on examining their theoretical relevance.

Barnett’s Legislative Learning is based largely on his doctoral dissertation. As such, the book is exceptionally well cited. Barnett’s focus is on to what extent the behavior of the Republican freshmen class of 1994 was consistent or inconsistent with other members and whether any differences are supportive of certain theoretical perspective more than others found in the literature. For example, Barnett’s treatment of the tension between Mayhew’s re-election goal perspective and Fenno’s multiple goal approach is both provocative and insightful.

The evidence used in Barnett’s book is largely anecdotal and is mostly derived from secondary sources. Nevertheless, Barnett uses these sources skillfully. For example, in some of his most interesting observations, Barnett describes in great detail the difficulty the House Republican leadership had in controlling the Republican Class of 1994 during the passage of special rules governing debate for committee funding of the House Oversight Committee and the flood relief bills. His coverage of these events leads to broader discussions of the motivations and goals of the class generally.

Barnett also introduces a limited amount of original data and presents the results of several personal interviews as well. His survey data is limited to only ten questions answered by member’s legislative staffers. The survey had several measures aimed at determining the cohesion of the class as well as its perceived mandate. Not surprisingly, Barnett finds that members of the 1994 Republican Freshmen class had high level of class cohesion and the perception of a reform-oriented mandate.

Overall, Barnett’s Legislative Learning is a well-done theoretical volume that attempts to understand the Republican Freshmen Class of 1994 through competing interpretations of principal-agent analysis and member goal and ambition theories. Scholars hoping to find specific hypotheses developed and tested with empirical data will be disappointed. Nevertheless, due to its focus on the theoretical implications of this important class of legislators, I would recommend it to supplement Fenno, Armacost, and Rae’s texts.