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Barry C. Burden

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"This is an impressive work. Burden's argument that ideology is important, but is not everything, is compelling. It does not tear down what we know but rather builds on the existing literature with a new take. What he gives us--that some issues may not reflect the standard left-right continuum, and that legislators' personal experiences and values come into play here--is both highly original and very important."--Eric M. Uslaner, University of Maryland

"This book represents a major contribution to the study of legislative politics. Its purpose is to explore how legislators are influenced by their own personal backgrounds and experiences as they go about their legislative activities, including roll-call voting, floor speeches, and cosponsoring legislation. It will be widely read by legislative scholars and will influence how they think about the determinants of legislative behavior."--James Garand, Louisiana State University

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Personal Roots of Representation

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Rick Santorum and Arlen Specter were something of an odd couple when it comes to Washington politics. Although both were United States senators representing Pennsylvania, and both are Republican, their policy views could not have been more divergent. One sought compromise and generally avoided hot-button issues; the other was defined by such issues. Santorum was chair of the Republican conference in the Senate and an advocate of conservative policies, particularly on sensitive social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Specter is pro-choice and often bucks his party, to the point of generating backlash from Republican colleagues. These fundamental differences in their preferences affected not only their voting records but their decisions about which issues to tackle.

Particularly on domestic social issues, it is difficult to overstate the differences that separate the two senators. As Congressional Quarterly put it, "An unalloyed social conservative, Santorum saves his toughest fights for the issue of abortion. He is a leader in the fight to outlaw a procedure that opponents call 'partial birth' abortion, which he has called 'barbaric' and 'the calculated killing of the nearly born.'" Specter, in contrast, is one of the few true moderates left in Congress. Some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate even challenged his position as chair of the Judiciary Committee when he suggested that conservative judicial nominees would get serious scrutiny. CQ reports that, unlike Santorum, "Specter fights to soften anti-abortion language in the GOP platform, tries to outdo Democrats on education spending, and not infrequently votes with Democrats on issues such as extending unemployment benefits and allowing patients to sue their managed-care health plans." Although a four-term senator, he barely managed to win the 2004 Republican primary election in which he faced a more conservative challenger.

As one summary indicator of their differences, consider Poole and Rosenthal's measure of legislative ideology known as NOMINATE. Their procedure uses roll call votes to place legislators on a unidimensional scale where 1 is most liberal and 1 is most conservative. By this yardstick, Santorum came in at .44, making him the 15th most conservative senator in the 108th Congress. Specter was located at .06, ranking him 51st in a chamber of 100. Nearly every other roll call indicator shows the same gulf between the two, a gap that is larger than that between the political parties themselves.

Why were Santorum and Specter so different, not only in their positions but in their policy priorities? Unfortunately, the usual suspects that congressional scholars line up to explain policy differences do not provide much of an answer. Were they from different states, a constituency focus would be the place to start. But they shared a common constituency in Pennsylvania, so electoral explanations cannot be responsible for the differences. Pennsylvania politics tend to be bifurcated between the eastern and western ends of the state, so it is possible that Santorum and Specter divide up the state geographically. Yet the differences in their voting records are far greater than demographic differences between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia would dictate. Both Santorum and Specter were seasoned politicians with years of congressional experience (and law degrees), thus rendering career-based explanations unhelpful. Finally, and most obviously, both senators were Republicans, rendering a partisan explanation for their actions moot. If career, constituency, and party affiliation fail, what accounts for the stark differences between Santorum and Specter? In reviewing their cases, the importance of more personal factors becomes obvious.

As a start, consider some facts about Santorum's background. His CQ biography documents, "The son of an Italian immigrant-a Veterans Administration psychologist-the boyish-faced Santorum stresses individual responsibility and self-reliance, not government assistance programs. He can draw on his own experience of holding down a full-time job while attending law school." Knowing just this, it might not be especially surprising that Santorum is conservative on fiscal matters.

But Santorum is best known for his activism on social issues, primarily his opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. He is a devout Catholic who attends Mass daily and held a course on Catholicism for fellow Republican members of Congress. He even helped convert fellow senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) to Catholicism. A former aide went so far as to call him "a Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate."

Despite the obvious importance of Santorum's faith, he did not immediately tackle difficult morality issues when first elected to Congress. He was conservative on social matters but not especially active. "Santorum was pro-life from the time he first ran for Congress, but it wasn't an issue he was vocal about. Santorum never gave a speech about abortion in the House or Senate until the late-term-abortion debates of 1996 and 1997." The timing of this shift from passive to active opposition corresponds to a critical event in Santorum's personal life.

In 1996 Santorum's wife, Karen, was due with their fourth child. The pregnancy suffered from complications, and doctors warned that the baby had a fatal defect. Twice the doctors proposed aborting the fetus, an idea that the Santorums rejected. To cope with the pregnancy's uncertainty, Karen began writing letters to the unborn child, already named Gabriel Michael Santorum. As doctors warned, Gabriel was born prematurely at five months and lived only a couple of hours outside the womb. Rather than follow standard protocol, the Santorums took the body home rather than to a funeral home and changed a hospital form's description from "20-week-old fetus" to "20-week-old baby." Although understandably upset about the outcome, Santorum was nonetheless satisfied that Gabriel died "naturally" rather than by an abortive "murder." Now the father of six children, Santorum holds memories of Gabriel close. He keeps a framed photo of the baby on his desk. His wife's prenatal letters to Gabriel were published as a book that condemns "infanticide" and "partial-birth abortion" while advocating for her husband's renewed fight against such practices in the Senate. Santorum believes that Gabriel's death intensified his views about abortion, which he now sees as the great moral issue facing America. His intensity about the issue clearly stems from personal experience.

Arlen Specter's values come from an entirely different orientation, but likewise have their roots in life experience. They start not with religion but with a prosecutorial nose for the facts. A former district attorney, Specter is known for his tenaciousness, strong work ethic, and especially his independence (Fenno 1991). His independent streak motivated him to switch parties early in his career to increase his chances of winning office. Specter is also the son of a Russian immigrant and one of just a few Jewish Republicans in Congress. When called "ambitious," Specter "reaches back to his immigrant roots," saying, "When I was a growing up ambition was not only a good word in our household, it was an indispensable word" (quoted in Fenno 1991, 5).

Specter was never a typical Republican on social issues, and became less so over time as the party...