Senators On The Campaign Trail Book

This is a book about the politics of representative democracy, written from the perspective of the politicians who make it work. Typically, political scientists study campaigns from the perspective of the voter and for the purpose of explaining election outcomes. But campaigns also need to be studied from the perspective of the candidate, for the purpose of understanding representation. Richard F. Fenno, Jr., traveled with ten U.S. senators as they campaigned in their home states - using what he calls the "drop in/drop out, tag along/hang around" method of research - to present a developmental picture of their activities. His focus here is on three such activities - pursuing a career, campaigning for office, and building constituency connections. Taken together, the three constitute the political underpinnings of representative democracy. In its focus on the process of representative democracy, Senators on the Campaign Trail offers a rich, rounded, developmental view of some high-level individuals who work at the business of representation. For scholars, the book suggests some qualitative confirmation and added stimulation in forging generalizations about politicians. For citizens, the book argues for replacing the conventional blanket condemnation of our politicians, so prevalent today, with more discriminating judgments about what they do, and why and to what purpose they do it.

Publishers Weekly

While most political scientists focus on polls, trends and statistics, Fenno's absorbing book compares the behavior of 10 Senatorial candidates on the campaign trail between 1976 and 1994, resulting in numerous unconventional insights into the how voters react to politicians. Fenno compares former Iowa Senator Dick Clark's 1972 election, based largely on the popularity of his energetic walk across Iowa to meet voters, to his complacent an unsuccessful second campaign. Former astronaut John Glenn didn't have to go to such lengths for name recognition, but it wasn't until he addressed a union of boilerplate workers in 1980 that he stumbled across the fact that the audience was more deeply responsive to his own personal past as a plumber's son than to his status as national hero. Fenno also makes an instructive comparison between Glenn's failure in one election to the success of the young Dan Quayle in another: "Quayle," he notes, "had no reputation... but he also had nothing to lose." There are many subtle distinctions between candidates' institutional ambitions in the Senate and their electoral ambitions in their home states, and there is the concept of personal representation versus policy representation, and Fenno clearly defines all these. Although he can be repetitively defensive about the academic validity of his approach, Fenno's focus on individual details restores a humanity to the Senate in an era of public cynicism about public institutions. (June)