The topic of this episode is, “What are congressional norms and why do they matter?”
To many Americans, the United States Congress appears to be a rather nasty place. There are lawmakers calling each other names, introducing resolutions to censure legislators and boot them off committees, and generally behaving towards one another in beastly ways. At least twice in the last few years there were moments when it appeared a couple of members of the House of Representatives might well throw punches at one another.
There is a lot of constitutional and procedural hardball being played in both the Senate and the House. Members are ignoring long-agreed-upon rules or stretching their meanings to justify partisan power plays.
All of which prompts the question, “Is Congress losing the norms that once helped facilitate collective action amongst representatives and senators?
My guest for this episode is Brian Alexander. He is an Associate Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. Brian is also the author of A Social Theory of Congress: Legislative Norms in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books, 2021), and he is the editor of a new volume titled The Folkways of Congress: Legislative Norms in an Era of Conflict (Brookings Institution Press, 2026).
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Brian, welcome to the podcast.
Brian Alexander:
Thanks, Kevin. Thanks a lot for having me. I really appreciate being here and all the good work you do.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s start with a very simple question. What is a norm?
Brian Alexander:
Norms are the informal rules. These are the ideas that members of Congress hold about what is appropriate. Obviously, norms exist in culture and society, but my research is on congressional norms.
Norms are the things that aren’t covered in the Constitution. They are the things that aren’t covered in the rules and the precedents. They’re the ways of doing things that can be tradition-bound, but most likely they’re done simply because members think they are appropriate. They’re informal practices that let the institution do what it does better or allow a member to get what he or she wants, and so norms are upheld because they’re helpful.
In my research, and sort of the way I think about norms, is that they’re not just instrumental—borrowing a fancy phrase from international relations theory—they can be constitutive. They are ideas about what is appropriate given a person’s identity as a lawmaker. So irrespective of the consequences of the norm, irrespective of their instrumental value, sometimes people just follow norms because it’s what they do.
Kevin Kosar:
One thing that pops into my mind is a member of Congress being condemned for conduct unbecoming of a member; not so much that they took a bribe or broke a formal rule, but there was just something that kind of made other members go, “We shouldn’t do that. That’s not part of who we are.”
Another place my brain went to is baseball. Baseball has all sorts of formal rules, but then there are these unwritten things. For example, if you hit a home run, it’s not okay to just stand there and stare at it and then glare at the pitcher and get a smirk on your face and slow trot your way around the bases. There’s no official rule against doing that, but we’ve seen fights that start on a field after a home run gets hit because it’s one of those things that is an unwritten rule.
Brian Alexander:
Norms, again, are like that. Sometimes they’re helpful. The classic example of a norm that operates in that instrumental sense or that functional sense is the courtesy norm. You behave courteously, not just because it’s the polite thing to do; that’s the second way that norms function. You behave courteously because it’s easier to get things done when you uphold civility, when you’re nice—and not just following the rules of decorum as written into the rules of the House and Senate—but you’re courteous toward one another because you get more done if you are nice to one another. People are gonna like you, and they’re going to want to work with you. That’s an example of a classic norm that people have often long considered that has this functional role.
It has its instrumental purpose, and it has its strategic value in being nice. But just like in baseball, you hit a good home run. You don’t act like a jerk when you do it. Sometimes you just do that, because that’s why you do things. Your identity as a lawmaker is to be courteous. It’s to be civil, and I know folks that maybe don’t spend as much time around Congress as you and I might, and people who are on the Hill every day.
But despite what you see in the news, despite what you see on social media, Congress remains a relatively civil place. There’s a lot of courtesy that goes on behind the scenes, across party lines, across chambers, and so forth, and a lot of that is for these two ways that I think we should understand norms.
On the one hand, it’s strategic. You’re going to get more done if you’re just not thought of as a jerk, if you’re not always disrupting things. But it’s also just kind of how people are. They’re going to look at it as, “This is what I do as a lawmaker. I need to be civil. I need to exercise decorum. I need to have a certain amount of dignity in how I comport myself.” So the civility norm is sort of a classic illustration of both the instrumental view of norms, but also constitutes—what I wrote in my book A Social Theory of Congress—the social identities of lawmakers.
Kevin Kosar:
That reminds me of a lawmaker who upset a rather powerful member of the House some years ago, and he got to Capitol Hill, and he had some good ideas.
And he drafted a bill, but had an enormous difficulty getting anybody to co-sign it with him, not because it was going to cost a bunch of money or because there was anything inherently objectionable about it. It was simply because he violated norms in various ways that put people off and cratered his opportunities for collective action. Not too many elections later, he was out of the House.
But where do norms come from? They are not in the Constitution or in the House or Senate rules. Who decides that a norm is something that everyone is supposed to do?
Brian Alexander:
It is a very difficult question.
On the instrumental side, norms can emerge out of the need to solve collective action problems. The courtesy norm, the apprenticeship norm, specialization, and other norms that we have historically seen in the chamber serve to solve a collective action problem in making the institution run better and perform its legislative functions better. So you may see norms emerge because they help us overcome the collective action dilemma and allow the institution to do better.
At the same time—and this ties to how my own interest in the study of norms emerged—norms are sociological, they are anthropological. Some of my background and interest in this is from spending probably too much time reading Foucault as an undergraduate. But then in graduate school, reading Alexander Wendt and Martha Finnemore, who looked at people’s identities and at the ideas people had about who they were in their particular roles, interests are not simply strategic things. Interests are values that people have. Interests are ideas about what to prioritize, and those things are fundamentally very human. The civility norm is a great example that is probably tied to certain aspects of human behavior.
It may or may not be important that these are sociological or anthropological phenomena, but we’ve learned on things like seniority, you don’t have to uphold seniority. It doesn’t necessarily solve all problems. It’s not necessarily the best way to operate or for Congress to function. But people do it out of habit. They do it out of what their identity suggests ought to be done. But then what we see is that when people say, “Why are we doing it this way? Let’s do it a different way,” norms can quickly get disrupted. So there’s an aspect to the whole study of norms, which, to me, opens up new avenues for understanding Congress as a social system. A lot of our research in political science is quantitative, and it’s these discrete variables that we can measure in terms of votes and co-sponsorship. Even our measures for ideology, like DW-nominate scores, aren’t really looking at the ideas. They’re not really looking at the human qualities of members of Congress and of the institution. They’re looking at these sorts of measurable things that can be determined by strategy.
The study of norms to me opens up the study of Congress, and our understanding of Congress is something that’s far more human. It’s probably more Shakespearean than it is rational choice. That makes it both a little more vexing to study, but also a little more interesting.
Kevin Kosar:
I’m having flashbacks of a book that came out long ago, but it was really an unusual piece of work for me as a grad student trying to learn about Congress. The book was called Tribes on the Hill, which kind of gives you the vibe for this person’s approach to doing it. He was not just counting votes and trying to run analyses to detect patterns in the votes. It was really just kind of like Jane Goodall amongst the chimps, looking and going, this group of legislators are like silverbacks or something, and these guys are kind of clustered in because of their regional memberships and identities.
And nobody else has really tried to do anything to remotely close to that other than your work on norms, which tries to get past just the numbers and the rational choice and econometric models for looking at Congress, or things like pure polarization as a filter or the parties as the filter through everything, but rather to get in there and try to get at the complicated stuff: all these sort of little rules that we as humans experience in our day-to-day lives.
Brian Alexander:
Yes, and it makes Congress a little more human. The study of humans is difficult. But I think beyond simply an anthropological approach, the study of norms helps us understand that norms do have consequences.
The courtesy norm really stands out because it was upheld for years. You may remember a particular member of Congress who shouted out at a president in a joint address to Congress way back in the fall of 2009. That was talked about for years when I was doing research forthe book, Social Theory of Congress, which was in the mid-2010s and a little bit after. That example came up time after time after time as one of incivility and of the breach of the civility norm.
If you watch a State of the Union now, it’s a lot like Prime Minister’s Questions at the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, where there’s just this back and forth, and so it’s no longer this breach of protocol.
And something where somebody’s an outlier, it may be expected, which ties to a more conflict addled environment. That’s not just ideological, that’s not just a partisan strategy. That is because the norm of being civil toward one’s president or toward one’s colleagues has changed, and norms of conflict are emerging to where it’s acceptable to behave in a very sort of undecorous way.
That affects our politics, that affects the relationships, that affects people’s abilities and capabilities to get along with one another. And fundamentally, it winds up having effects on how well Congress can function in upholding its democratic purpose.
Kevin Kosar:
Could you talk more about the link to Foucault?
Brian Alexander:
Without trying to do my feeble best at explaining Foucault to your listeners, Foucault looked at the ways we know things as structuring power. The idea is that the constructs we have of what constitutes a truth claim—the way in which the structure of our knowledge shapes how we know the world—affects what we think is both legitimate and illegitimate. And it also shapes our interests. Foucault looked at this in the study of power, the study of social institutions, prisons, and a lot of relations between power and authority.
Then, in graduate school, I’m studying international relations theory, where you have a construct that’s very similar to our rational choice framework in the study of Congress.
And in a lot of the study of American government in IR theory, there are discrete interests. There’s sort of a rational choice hierarchy of priorities, and then actors in the international system behave strategically to achieve those goals. We basically have that same model in which we understand Congress, if we understand a member of Congress to be primarily motivated by reelection power in Congress, and then good public policy.
And in that order, you can apply that rational choice framework that you see existing in international relations theory. And we use it in Congress, and Foucault doesn’t come into play at all. None of that does, because you assume the interests are given, but what Foucault is doing and what a lot of the sort of postmodern work is doing, and then, to bring back in international relations theory, Alexander Wendt has a book called Social Theory of International Relations. I have one called A Social Theory of Congress, which is sort of a nod to Alexander Wendt and then Martha Finnemore over at GW, who look at this thing called constructivism. And then looking at international systems, they’re saying that the interests are socially constructed. Ideas about what is appropriate, ideas about what interests become fundamental to how nations operate in the international system—a group of nations that believes that human rights ought to be a priority is going to behave much differently than a group of nations that does not believe human rights are a priority.
Similarly, my thought was, “Why is congressional studies so mired in this rational choice framework when there are other ways of understanding how humans behave?”
So the long-winded answer to your question is to say, I wanted to look at how interests are socially constructed. I wanted to look at the role of ideas about what is appropriate, ideas about identities—how those shape what members of Congress do, even something we take for granted like the electoral imperative, which is sort of the classic starting point in congressional theory. That’s an interest that is socially constructed. It could very easily be the case that members of Congress didn’t look at their fundamental goal as getting reelected. You could have a different idea about that. Most people don’t, and the system, of course, would weed out those who don’t share that. But we could have this idea that you’re going to serve one or two terms and then naturally fade out. But that’s not how we understand people. So even that fundamental interest that we think every member of Congress as reelection is a norm.
Kevin Kosar:
One thing that I and numerous other people have complained about is that the concept of the identity of a legislator has, in our view, devolved insofar as, rather than thinking of themselves as members of the most powerful branch, the lawmaking branch, the source of all authority, a lot of members today behave first and foremost as a member of a party and take a quasi-parliamentary mindset to the job. They think, “If it’s our guy in the White House, we’ll just line up and do what he wants to the maximum extent feasible. And if it’s the other party’s guy in the White House, we’ll oppose to the maximum degree feasible.”
That is very different from an identity that draws first and foremost from an assumption of, “I’m a constitutional actor, and I take the Constitution seriously,” or, “I am first and foremost a representative of this state or this district, and everything else falls below that in the hierarchy, and that’s going to affect the behavior.”
One thing that is noteworthy is the parallels between Congress and international relations, in that they both have these ceremonial aspects around them. You think about in Congress and the House and the doorkeeper. In international relations, when high-level government officials meet for an official diplomatic meeting, there are all sorts of protocols that are expected to be followed and that are closely watched, because in this way, it tells you something about the nature of the relationship and the respect and the power dynamics. These are sociological phenomena.
Brian Alexander:
Yeah, and now you’re making me go back to Weber, and the sorts of rituals that confer legitimacy or authority. There’s so much to unpack there that I think is just interesting, and helps us think about whether it helps us fix Congress. But I feel like, at least by helping us to understand that these are humans, and that they are, in fact, behaving in very human ways, allows us to appreciate the way the institution functions.
I know it’s important to think of strategy and partisan strategy, and I know it’s obviously the rational choice framework, and understanding them as strategic actors is still very important. But there’s much to be said for understanding Congress as a kind of social system, and the consequences can be real because you name a very good example of where members of Congress’s identity seem to be more attributable to that of a member of parliament than people who look are a member of the Article One branch of the United States Constitution.
Maybe we are seeing the consequences of that right now, with Congress being deferential to one of the most unique presidents we’ve had in some time, and not standing up for a lot of its constitutional prerogatives.
Kevin Kosar:
We’re getting low on time, but I have got to ask you one more question.
I set this episode up by saying that viewers probably look at Congress and see it as a normalist place, a place where there are people being nasty to each other and all that sort of stuff. But you have argued that, no, norms still exist. You mentioned the civility norm. For listeners out there, in order to give them the glasses they need to see norms, what are one or two other examples, if they turn on C-SPAN or pick up the newspaper or whatever, that they’ll go, “There’s a norm I hadn’t seen before.”
Brian Alexander:
So I did this book, A Social Theory of Congress, on my own. And I said, “Well, I’m not the best guy or the only guy that should be talking about this.” So I invited a great handful of scholars, yourself included, to do this next book called The Folkways of Congress, which is looking at the norms that exist today in the 21st century, and you see things like apprenticeship, which is where members come in, and they try to learn the ropes of the institution before they take on leadership roles. You see reciprocity, where members still offer give and take. Think of it just like back scratching, where you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Members still do this
Institutional patriotism is another example. People think that their institutions are actually the greatest deliberative bodies on earth, and notably in each case that I just identified, we have research in the forthcoming book—and I have some in my first book on this—that does support that these things exist.
Now, I think a listener is going to be like, “Wait a minute. Congress doesn’t look like it does any of those things.”
This is where norms come back into play. And in fact, they are resilient. Despite what you see on Twitter and the people shouting at each other on cable news and all the other sort of rhetoric that gains attention, norms of cooperation exist in the modern Congress, and they help the institution work better.
But those norms are under attack. We see that from members themselves. We see this in the changing tone of American politics, up to and including the current occupant of the White House. So while norms can hold us together, if norms of conflict grow too much, norms can also tear us apart.
Kevin Kosar:
Here’s to hoping the norms in the republic hold. Professor Brian Alexander, author of two books on congressional norms, thank you for helping us better understand congressional norms and their importance.
Brian Alexander:
Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate it.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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