Some Notes on the Congressional Campaign Committees

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MERICAN POLITICAL party organization, nationally and locally, has tended toward proliferation and atomization. At the national level both parties have four committees, each spending considerable sums of money to promote the party interest in one way or another. These are the national committees, the congressional committees, the senatorial committees and the Senate committees. For good measure, the House Republicans converted their steering into the House policy committee in 1949.1 In recent years several political scientists have investigated and reported on the precinct, district, county, and state central committees in several of the states. To date very little has appeared in print on the national party organizations. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that these organizations operate without bylaws and almost never publish annual reports, and that much of their organization and operation is highly fluid and personal in character. Basic and strategy are usually determined in secret and the most intriguing aspects of their operation are kept confidential. With the congressional and senatorial committees in particular, interview provides the only method of investigating their activities, and the interviewer soon finds that some of the most vital aspects of their work will not be made available to him. This article attempts to report and to evaluate some of the facts which have been learned about these little-publicized party institutions.2 Several generalizations are made which are relevant to these committees during the Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Congresses and are not necessarily valid during other sessions. The behavioral scientist, dedicated as he is to the search for uniformities, will find that the congressional committees (as well as the national and Senate committees) are often not functionally the same at different times. There also exists a rather substantial difference