For a decade, scholars have debated the impact of rising partisanship on the internal workings of the Congress. With the publication of Daniel Lipinski's analysis of House members' communications to their constituents, it appears that they also need to consider the effects of party conflict on representation at home. Using newsletters and targeted mailings from 1991 to 1995, as well as surveys and interviews with House members and their staffs, Lipinski assesses the communication strategies of a sample of 100 lawmakers and arrives at conclusions that challenge some long-standing views about the interaction of House members and their constituents.

The incumbency effect motivated earlier work on the interaction of legislators with their districts, focusing particularly on the ability of House members to build personal connections with constituents that transcended party and provided electoral protection against adverse national tides. The research of David R. Mayhew, Richard Fenno, John D. Kingdon, Morris P. Fiorina, R. Douglas Arnold, Gary C. Jacobson and many others stressed the individualistic orientation of members, their capacity to shape the Congress to their own political ends, and their avoidance of collective responsibility. Today, the incumbency effect is even stronger, but the efforts of elites to nationalize congressional elections and the propensity for party voting within the electorate raises the possibility that such tactics have limits.

Lipinski's results provide a mixed verdict on the payoffs for legislative individualism. On the one hand, he demonstrates that “running against Congress” was still common in the 1990s but was no longer the dominant strategy for members that it appeared to be in the 1970s, when Fenno wrote Home Style (1978). Indeed, attacking the institution appears to have emerged as a tactic best suited to minority party members, whether Republican or Democrat. In addition, he shows how the likelihood that members will be critical of Congress is strongly related to the frequency with which they vote with the majority party and the district-level support for the majority party. On the other hand, Lipinski finds that Democratic members who stressed the “end of gridlock” and legislative accomplishments of the 103d Congress in their newsletters had a very high probability of defeat in 1994, especially in comparison to colleagues with similar vulnerabilities who separated themselves from the institution.

The unique period in contemporary congressional history that Lipinski studies may account for his findings. His focus on the early to mid-1990s had the fortunate benefit of creating a natural experiment in examining how members respond to shifts in party control of the institution. At the same time, the 1994 election was undeniably an unusual, watershed event. Republicans mounted an unprecedented attack on Congress as an institution in order to discredit an entrenched Democratic majority, and Democrats failed to appreciate the extent of their vulnerability. Lipinski's concluding remarks suggesting a need for a longitudinal analysis of member communications thus seems important for determining whether the mid-1990s were anomalous in terms of legislators' communications with their constituents.

An intriguing aspect of the analysis concerns the capacity of members to educate their constituents about roll call votes on major bills before Congress. Lipinski offers evidence that when lawmakers take the trouble to talk about their records, voters become better informed about what their representatives are doing in Washington. With questions from two different American National Election Studies surveys, Lipinski develops measures of voters' accuracy in identifying how individual members voted on both the 1991 Gulf War Resolution and the 1993 Budget and Reconciliation Act. He then combines this data, along with the usual individual controls, to assess whether residents of districts with communicative lawmakers were better able to identify their member's position. Both the congruence of the media market and the publicity effort of the member were positive and significant, especially for the Gulf War vote. For constituents with Republican representatives, however, publicity activity about the reconciliation bill appears to have been modest and to have had little effect because the news media had covered Republican opposition to the Clinton budget so heavily. This is admittedly a weak test because Lipinski has no way of determining whether or not particular constituents read or retained the content of congressional newsletters. It is consistent, however, with an emerging literature on voting behavior about citizens who can and do respond to personal communications from political actors.

Given the public accessibility and longitudinal nature of newsletters and targeted mailings, one wonders why congressional scholars have not mined these data in recent years to evaluate legislative behavior. Lipinski's discussion of the merits of such sources in comparison to news coverage or campaign ads is quite persuasive. Consequently, one wishes that he had not framed his question quite so narrowly. By focusing on the issue of institutional performance, he passed up opportunities to talk about other representational aspects of legislators' communications to constituents—differences in lawmakers' agendas, for example, or their relative propensities for credit claiming and position taking. In addition, a broader set of questions might have enabled him to exploit comparisons between mass newsletters to the entire district and targeted mailings more extensively.

In sum, Congressional Communication is a timely reminder of the dynamic nature of Congress and how members adapt to changing political contexts. This is not a “big” book in terms of its length or scope, but it is relevant to big questions of representation that are of perennial interest to legislative scholars.