Using his well-honed skills of observation and insight, Richard F. Fenno provides a fresh look at representation by black members of Congress in Going Home and discovers both similarities and differences in the constituent connection. Based on interviews spanning more than three decades, Going Home examines the congressional careers and district connections of Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), Chaka Fattah (D-Penn.) and Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio).
Fenno's access to each of the MCs varies in duration and depth, and he qualifies his findings as "unusually tentative" in part because he is a "white researcher immersed, briefly, in the affairs of black communities" (10). Nonetheless, the portrait he weaves draws adeptly on personal interviews, first-hand observation and biographical material, and he credits the influence of contemporary work on black representatives by Carol Swain (1993) and David Canon (1999). Fenno steps beyond the concepts of ÒdescriptiveÓ and "substantive" representation and describes the web of connections -- electoral, policy, personal and organizational -- of his subjects.
Fenno finds some distinctive aspects of the representational connection between African American members of Congress and their districts. For example, he professes surprise at the "high-priority preoccupation with education" that the four representatives share (258). Fenno notes that the "educative" function of political representation takes on a distinctive character for these four members of Congress who not only stress the importance of educational opportunity to their own careers but also emphasize education as the key to future progress in their districts.
Fenno also suggests that the symbolic and organizational significance of black representation differs from what he has found among white representatives. Because of initial white political resistance to the candidacy of these MCs, all four congressional members featured in Fenno's study had to maintain a degree of local political involvement -- from the design of.....
