The Functions of the Political Campaign

Abstract

SHE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states. .. . Such is the brief, perhaps almost casual, reference to the sensitive and intractable problem of representation set down in Article I, Section II, of the Constitution of the United States. While provision was made here for geographic representation by states and provision was made elsewhere for equal representation of those given the vote, the constitutional provisions for representation do not adequately comprehend the need for representation of collective and organized interests. Many such gaps are found in the Constitution. Most of them have been filled through the development of traditional practices and institutional devices. The political campaign has become one of these traditional practices; and the values embodied in the institutional arrangements through which it is mounted and executed constitute an elaboration of the constitutional provisions concerning representation. Campaigns are electioneering devices, means of getting candidates elected. But campaigns also embody traditional practices which manifest some of our answers to the most thorny aspects of the problems of representation. A congressman from Washington State knows that his constituents agree on the promotion of trade with Alaska; but which of the overwhelming combinations of powerful interest groups aligned on either side of the Hell's Canyon issue should he represent? It is during the development of the campaign that this aspect of the problem of representation is initially resolved. It is during the campaign in its broader sense --that the determination is made as to which interests shall have primary access to the representative. And it is during the campaign that the candidate develops the identification with the objectives of interest groups and alliances with interest groups which enable them to make a claim on the policy preferences he represents. The focus of this analysis of the congressional campaign in Washington's First District, in 1954, is on the broad functional impact and the basic political consequences of the campaign as the institutional device through which the principle of representation was not only elaborated but implemented.'