Issue Politics in Congress

Issue Politics in Congress PDF Author: Tracy Sulkin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521855211
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? This study, exploring how legislators' experiences as candidates shape their subsequent behavior as policymakers, demonstrates that winning legislators regularly take up their challengers' priority issues from the last campaign and act on them. This attentiveness to their challengers' issues reflects a widespread and systematic yet largely unrecognized mode of responsiveness in the U.S. Congress. Tracy Sulkin reveals the important benefits for these legislators as well as the health and legitimacy of the representative process.

Issue Politics in Congress

Issue Politics in Congress PDF Author: Tracy Sulkin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521855211
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? This study, exploring how legislators' experiences as candidates shape their subsequent behavior as policymakers, demonstrates that winning legislators regularly take up their challengers' priority issues from the last campaign and act on them. This attentiveness to their challengers' issues reflects a widespread and systematic yet largely unrecognized mode of responsiveness in the U.S. Congress. Tracy Sulkin reveals the important benefits for these legislators as well as the health and legitimacy of the representative process.

Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving

Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving PDF Author: E. Scott Adler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139619950
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
How do issues end up on the agenda? Why do lawmakers routinely invest in program oversight and broad policy development? What considerations drive legislative policy change? For many, Congress is an institution consumed by partisan bickering and gridlock. Yet the institution's long history of addressing significant societal problems - even in recent years - seems to contradict this view. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving argues that the willingness of many voters to hold elected officials accountable for societal conditions is central to appreciating why Congress responds to problems despite the many reasons mustered for why it cannot. The authors show that, across decades of policy making, problem-solving motivations explain why bipartisanship is a common pattern of congressional behavior and offer the best explanation for legislative issue attention and policy change.

Congressional Record

Congressional Record PDF Author: United States. Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1452

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Book Description
The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

Party Polarization in Congress

Party Polarization in Congress PDF Author: Sean M. Theriault
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113947300X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The political parties in Congress are as polarized as they have been in 100 years. This book examines more than 30 years of congressional history to understand how it is that the Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have become so divided. It finds that two steps were critical for this development. First, the respective parties' constituencies became more politically and ideologically aligned. Second, members ceded more power to their party leaders, who implemented procedures more frequently and with greater consequence. In fact, almost the entire rise in party polarization can be accounted for in the increasing frequency of and polarization on procedures used during the legislative process.

Insecure Majorities

Insecure Majorities PDF Author: Frances E. Lee
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640918X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
“[A] tour de force. Building upon her argument in Beyond Ideology, she adds an important wrinkle into the current divide between the parties in Congress.” —Perspectives on Politics As Democrats and Republicans continue to vie for political advantage, Congress remains paralyzed by partisan conflict. That the last two decades have seen some of the least productive Congresses in recent history is usually explained by the growing ideological gulf between the parties, but this explanation misses another fundamental factor influencing the dynamic. In contrast to politics through most of the twentieth century, the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties compete for control of Congress at relative parity, and this has dramatically changed the parties’ incentives and strategies in ways that have driven the contentious partisanship characteristic of contemporary American politics. With Insecure Majorities, Frances E. Lee offers a controversial new perspective on the rise of congressional party conflict, showing how the shift in competitive circumstances has had a profound impact on how Democrats and Republicans interact. Beginning in the 1980s, most elections since have offered the prospect of a change of party control. Lee shows, through an impressive range of interviews and analysis, how competition for control of the government drives members of both parties to participate in actions that promote their own party’s image and undercut that of the opposition, including the perpetual hunt for issues that can score political points by putting the opposing party on the wrong side of public opinion. More often than not, this strategy stands in the way of productive bipartisan cooperation—and it is also unlikely to change as long as control of the government remains within reach for both parties.

Congress

Congress PDF Author: David R. Mayhew
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300130010
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
"Any short list of major analyses of Congress must of necessity include David Mayhew’s Congress: The Electoral Connection." —Fred Greenstein In this second edition to a book that has achieved canonical status, David R. Mayhew argues that the principal motivation of legislators is reelection and that the pursuit of this goal affects the way they behave and the way that they make public policy. In a new foreword for this edition, R. Douglas Arnold discusses why the book revolutionized the study of Congress and how it has stood the test of time.

Ideology and Congress

Ideology and Congress PDF Author: Howard Rosenthal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351513788
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
In Ideology and Congress, authors Poole and Rosenthal have analyzed over 13 million individual roll call votes spanning the two centuries since Congress began recording votes in 1789. By tracing the voting patterns of Congress throughout the country's history, the authors find that, despite a wide array of issues facing legislators, over 81 percent of their voting decisions can be attributed to a consistent ideological position ranging from ultraconservatism to ultraliberalism. In their classic 1997 volume, Congress: A Political Economic History of Roll Call Voting, roll call voting became the framework for a novel interpretation of important episodes in American political and economic history. Congress demonstrated that roll call voting has a very simple structure and that, for most of American history, roll call voting patterns have maintained a core stability based on two great issues: the extent of government regulation of, and intervention in, the economy; and race. In this new, paperback volume, the authors include nineteen years of additional data, bringing in the period from 1986 through 2004.

Poor Representation

Poor Representation PDF Author: Kristina C. Miler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108473504
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
The poor are grossly underrepresented in Congress both overall and by individual legislators, even those who represent high-poverty districts.

Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress

Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress PDF Author: Craig Volden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521761522
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Congress, the successes or failures of women and African Americans in Congress, policy gridlock, and the specific strategies that lawmakers employ to advance their agendas.

Act of Congress

Act of Congress PDF Author: Robert G. Kaiser
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744515
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
A Washington Post Notable Book An eye-opening account of how Congress today really works—and how it doesn’t— Act of Congress focuses on two of the major players behind the sweeping financial reform bill enacted in response to the Great Crash of 2008: colorful, wisecracking congressman Barney Frank, and careful, insightful senator Christopher Dodd, both of whom met regularly with Robert G. Kaiser during the eighteen months they worked on the bill. In this compelling narrative, Kaiser shows how staffers play a critical role, drafting the legislation and often making the crucial deals. Kaiser’s rare insider access enabled him to illuminate the often-hidden intricacies of legislative enterprise and shows us the workings of Congress in all of its complexity, a clearer picture than any we have had of how Congress works best—or sometimes doesn’t work at all.