In their book Non-Voting, published in 1924, Charles E. Merriam and Harold F. Gosnell reported that many persons otherwise eligible to vote had been disfranchised by Chicago's registration requirements. Their data showed that “there were three times as many adult citizens who could not vote because they had failed to register as there were registered voters who had failed to vote in the particular election” and that “entirely different reasons [for not voting] were emphasized by those who were not registered than by those who were registered but did not vote …” Their observation can hardly be said to have been influential. Until very recently most students of voting have paid little attention to the temporally prior act of registration.

Failure to do so has had important consequences. It has made it easy to discount unduly the significance of political influences on the size and composition of electorates; easy to argue unrealistically about the value of efforts to increase the turnout of voters; and easy to be puzzled about some aspects of the behavior of voters.

In the last ten years, an extensive and useful literature has developed on state legislative behavior. This paper reports on an exploratory study of three questions about state legislative processes: (1) What is the relationship between labor representation and legislative outcomes? (2) Are there measurable connections between a legislative role and perceptions of political events and relationships? (3) Does simultaneous individual association with labor and a legislative party result in measurable crosspressures? The responses of sixty-two Rhode Island activists provide the data. The research was designed to provide an empirical basis for comparisons of the perceptions of various participants.

The study utilized differentiated sets of legislators plus a set of interest group leaders. Labor legislators were Democratic legislators serving between 1952 and 1962 who, in their Rhode Island Manual biographies (for which they personally provided all the information), listed one of these associations with labor: official union position, union membership, or a source of livelihood in manual or crafts work. Fifteen of a universe of thirty were interviewed; the sample was weighted for legislative tenure. Rank and file Democratic legislators were legislators who served one or more terms in the General Assembly between 1952 and 1962, listed no association with labor in their biographies, and were not elected party leaders. Fifteen were sampled from a universe of one hundred twenty-three; the survey was weighted for legislative tenure. In addition, seven elected leaders, Democratic legislative leaders, were interviewed from a universe of ten. Labor executive board members were local union leaders between 1952 and 1962 who sat on the executive board of the Rhode Island AFL, CIO, or AFL-CIO (the product of a 1958 merger). Twenty-five were interviewed of a universe of sixty-one; the sample was weighted for terms on the board as well as to obtain the proper proportion from each group's pre-1958 governing structure. None served in the Assembly.