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.
