Congressional Communication

Congressional Communication PDF Author: Daniel William Lipinski
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472023748
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
"Lipinski's impressive analysis of members' communications with constituents yields major insights about partisanship, effects on reelection prospects, and constituent evaluations." --Bruce Oppenheimer, Vanderbilt University "The communication between representatives and their constituents is where election strategy and policy explanations are merged and, until now, we have had only anecdotal evidence. Lipinski's book sheds light on this important part of American political life." --David Brady, Stanford University Congressional Communication challenges the notion that legislators "run against Congress" by routinely denigrating the institution. Using a unique, systematic analysis of the communication from members of Congress to their constituents over a five-year period, Daniel Lipinski challenges this notion, demonstrating key partisan differences in representatives' portrayals of congressional activities. While members of the majority party tend to report that the institution-and, hence, their party-is performing well, members of the minority party are more likely to accuse Congress of doing a poor job. The findings in Congressional Communication offer the first strong empirical evidence from the electoral arena in support of controversial party government theories. Moving beyond previous studies that look only at legislators' messages, Lipinski's research also reveals the effects of these politically strategic claims on voters, whose interpretations don't necessarily bear out the legislators' intended effects. Daniel Lipinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee.

Congressional Communication

Congressional Communication PDF Author: Daniel William Lipinski
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472023748
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Lipinski's impressive analysis of members' communications with constituents yields major insights about partisanship, effects on reelection prospects, and constituent evaluations." --Bruce Oppenheimer, Vanderbilt University "The communication between representatives and their constituents is where election strategy and policy explanations are merged and, until now, we have had only anecdotal evidence. Lipinski's book sheds light on this important part of American political life." --David Brady, Stanford University Congressional Communication challenges the notion that legislators "run against Congress" by routinely denigrating the institution. Using a unique, systematic analysis of the communication from members of Congress to their constituents over a five-year period, Daniel Lipinski challenges this notion, demonstrating key partisan differences in representatives' portrayals of congressional activities. While members of the majority party tend to report that the institution-and, hence, their party-is performing well, members of the minority party are more likely to accuse Congress of doing a poor job. The findings in Congressional Communication offer the first strong empirical evidence from the electoral arena in support of controversial party government theories. Moving beyond previous studies that look only at legislators' messages, Lipinski's research also reveals the effects of these politically strategic claims on voters, whose interpretations don't necessarily bear out the legislators' intended effects. Daniel Lipinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee.

Congressional Record

Congressional Record PDF Author: United States. Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description


Congressional Communication in the Digital Age

Congressional Communication in the Digital Age PDF Author: Jocelyn Evans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351754343
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Communication defines political representation. At the core of the representational relationship lies the interaction between principal and agent; the quality of this relationship is predicated upon the accessibility of effective channels of communication between the constituent and representative. Over the past decade, congressional websites have become the primary way constituents communicate with their members and a prominent place for members to communicate with constituents. Yet, as we move toward the third decade of the 21st century, little work has systematically analyzed this forum as a distinct representational space. In this book, Jocelyn Evans and Jessica Hayden offer a fresh, timely, and mixed-methods approach for understanding how the emergence of virtual offices has changed the representational relationship between constituents and members of Congress. Utilizing strong theoretical foundations, a broad historical perspective, elite interviews, and rich original datasets, Evans and Hayden present evidence that virtual offices operate as a distinct representational space, and they demonstrate that their use has resulted in unprecedented and ill-understood changes in representational behavior. Congressional Communication in the Digital Age contributes to the scholarship on representation theory and its application to the contemporary Congress. It is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in American politics, political communication, and legislative politics.

The Pig Book

The Pig Book PDF Author: Citizens Against Government Waste
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 146685314X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The federal government wastes your tax dollars worse than a drunken sailor on shore leave. The 1984 Grace Commission uncovered that the Department of Defense spent $640 for a toilet seat and $436 for a hammer. Twenty years later things weren't much better. In 2004, Congress spent a record-breaking $22.9 billion dollars of your money on 10,656 of their pork-barrel projects. The war on terror has a lot to do with the record $413 billion in deficit spending, but it's also the result of pork over the last 18 years the likes of: - $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa - $102 million to study screwworms which were long ago eradicated from American soil - $273,000 to combat goth culture in Missouri - $2.2 million to renovate the North Pole (Lucky for Santa!) - $50,000 for a tattoo removal program in California - $1 million for ornamental fish research Funny in some instances and jaw-droppingly stupid and wasteful in others, The Pig Book proves one thing about Capitol Hill: pork is king!

Representational Style in Congress

Representational Style in Congress PDF Author: Justin Grimmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110747051X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics. Representational Style in Congress shows how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using a massive new data set of texts from legislators and new statistical techniques to analyze the texts, this book provides comprehensive measures of what legislators say to constituents and explains why legislators adopt these styles. Using the new measures, Justin Grimmer shows how legislators affect how constituents evaluate their representatives and the consequences of strategic statements for political discourse. The introduction of new statistical techniques for political texts allows a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of what legislators say and why it matters than was previously possible. Using these new techniques, the book makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.

Cycles of Spin

Cycles of Spin PDF Author: Patrick Sellers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139482513
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Sellers examines strategic communication campaigns in the U.S. Congress, arguing that they create cycles of spin: leaders create messages, rank-and-file legislators decide whether to promote those messages, journalists decide whether to cover the messages, and any coverage feeds back to influence the policy process.

A Legislative History of the Communications Act of 1934

A Legislative History of the Communications Act of 1934 PDF Author: Max D. Paglin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1016

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Book Description
The need for a comprehensive, annotated reference to the Communications Act of 1934 has been dramatically demonstrated in legal and government circles, but the legislative histories currently available contain only selected excerpts from the legislative documents, which are themselves prohibitively difficult to obtain. In this exhaustive reference, compiled by the former General Counsel and, later, Executive Director of the FCC, readers finally have access to the complete text of the Communications Act of 1934 as well as its underlying legislative components, including texts of Congressional hearings and debates, the Senate and House Committee reports, an index to the legislative materials and a wide range of other source material. Carefully annotated, the book includes a series of incisive articles on the historical, legal, and political aspects of the Act by such major figures in the communications field as Professor Glen O. Robinson, Kenneth A. Cox, William J. Byrnes, J. Roger Wollenberg, and Professor Ronald A. Cass. The most extensive collection of documents on the Communications Act ever published, this book will become an essential source for lawyers, judges, government agencies, Congressional staffs, and students and scholars of law and communications. This commemorative volume is produced through the cooperative efforts of the Golden Jubilee Commission on Telecommunications and the Federal Communications Bar Association.

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.

The Bill Status System for the United States House of Representatives

The Bill Status System for the United States House of Representatives PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. House Information Systems
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bills, Legislative
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description


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.