Download or read book Homeward Bound written by Glenn R. Parker and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Fenno first coined the term home style to describe the ways in which members of Congress cultivate the voters of their home constituencies. He suggested that incumbents were paying more attention to their constituents than they had in the past. In this book, Glenn Parker examines the relationship between activities at home and in Washington, asking specifically: Why and when did congressmen and senators begin to pay more attention to their constituents? And what are the institutional consequences of this change? Using data drawn from the travel vouchers filed by incumbent senators and congressmen between 1959 and 1980, Parker shows that since the mid-1960s incumbents have been placing greater emphasis on service to their state or district. Congress has facilitated this change in various ways, such as by increasing travel allowances and by scheduling that minimizes the conflict between legislative business in Washington and time spent with constituents. Parker's study includes both the Senate and House, and he draws distinctions between the home-style behaviors of senators and representatives. He also provides a historical context for understanding the dynamics of changes in home style. The time-series data generate explanations that specify relationships among historical conditions, individual behavior, and institutional structures.
Download or read book Congressional Behavior written by Nelson W. Polsby and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Color of Representation written by Kenny J. Whitby and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central domestic issue in the United States over the long history of this nation has been the place of the people of color in American society. One aspect of this debate is how African-Americans are represented in Congress. Kenny J. Whitby examines congressional responsiveness to black interests by focusing on the representational link between African-American constituents and the policymaking behavior of members of the United States House of Representatives. The book uses the topics of voting rights, civil rights, and race- based redistricting to examine how members of Congress respond to the interests of black voters. Whitby's analysis weighs the relative effect of district characteristics such as partisanship, regional location, degree of urbanization and the size of the black constituency on the voting behavior of House members over time. Whitby explores how black interests are represented in formal, descriptive, symbolic, and substantive terms. He shows the political tradeoffs involved in redistricting to increase the number of African-Americans in Congress. The book is the most comprehensive analysis of black politics in the congressional context ever published. It will appeal to political scientists, sociologists, historians, and psychologists concerned with minority politics, legislative politics, and the psychological, political, and sociological effects of increasing minority membership in Congress on the perception of government held by African Americans. Kenny J. Whitby is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina.
Download or read book Congress and the Foreign Policy Process written by Cecil V. Crabb, Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original and thoroughly informed study, Cecil V. Crabb, Jr., Glenn Antizzo, and Leila S. Sarieddine identify and examine recurring modes or patterns of legislative behavior over the span of America's diplomatic experience. Although congressional involvement in foreign policy making has received much scholarly attention, this work is groundbreaking in that it focuses on those patterns of congressional conduct that have repeated themselves over time and, on the basis of experience, will probably continue to occur. Thus it creates a large, predictable framework of legislative activity concerning America's problems abroad to which students of U.S. foreign policy can relate Congress's actions in any era. The authors identify four models of legislative conduct -- congressional assertiveness and activism in foreign affairs, congressional acquiescence in diplomatic leadership by the president, a bipartisan approach, and a division-of-labor model in which both the president and Congress play significant but essentially different roles. In examining each of these modes, the authors explore the circumstances and factors that gave rise to each pattern and evaluate its positive and negative results for the overall foreign policy of the United States. Brimming with lively language and invaluable observations, Congress and the Foreign Policy Process offers a thought- provoking means to understanding a complex and important area in the study of American government.
Download or read book Gendering Legislative Behavior written by Tiffany Barnes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using interview evidence and archival data from Argentina, the book examines why and when women collaborate in Congress.
Download or read book Every second year written by Charles O. Jones and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Our Laws are Made written by John V. Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress written by Craig Volden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Issue Politics in Congress written by Tracy Sulkin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? This study, one of the first to explore how legislators' experiences as candidates shape their subsequent behavior as policy makers, demonstrates that they do. Winning legislators regularly take up their challengers' priority issues from the last campaign and act on them in office, a phenomenon called 'issue uptake'. This attentiveness to their challengers' issues reflects a widespread and systematic yet largely unrecognized mode of responsiveness in the US Congress, but it is one with important benefits for the legislators who undertake it and for the health and legitimacy of the representative process. This book provides fresh insight into questions regarding the electoral connection in legislative behavior, the role of campaigns and elections, and the nature and quality of congressional representation.
Download or read book Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving written by E. Scott Adler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Contexts of Congressional Decision Behavior written by David C. Kozak and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The V 22 written by Kenneth J. Szczublewski and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Social Theory of Congress written by Brian Alexander and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-09 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role that norms play in the U.S. Congress? At a time of unprecedented partisanship and high-profile breaches of legislative norms in the modern Congress, the relationship between norms and the functioning of the institution is a growing and pressing concern. Despite the importance of the topic, recent scholarship has not focused on congressional norms. Meanwhile, previous research leaves open many relevant questions about the role of norms in the Congress of the twenty-first century. A Social Theory of Congress brings norms back in to the study of Congress by defining what are legislative norms, identifying which norms currently exist in the U.S. Congress, and examining the effects that congressional norms have. This book provides a new research approach to study congressional norms through a comprehensive review of previous scholarship and a combination of interviews, survey research, and analysis of member behavior. What’s more, an innovative theoretical framework — a social theory of Congress — provides new perspectives in the study of legislatures and political behavior. The findings are striking. Norms of cooperation are surprisingly alive and well in an otherwise partisan Congress. But norms of conflict are on the rise. In addition, norms of a changing culture are affecting how members understand their role as lawmakers and in their interactions among one another. Together, these findings suggest that norms play an important role in the functioning of the legislature and as norms evolve so too does the performance of Congress in American democracy.
Download or read book Congressional Careers written by John R. Hibbing and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to a Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans want elected officials to serve only a limited number of terms. Nevertheless, every two years American voters return, on average, more than 95 percent of incumbents to the U.S. House of Representatives. John Hibbing's book provides unique evidence of the problems that would result from congressional term limitations. The first scholar to analyze congressional careers using longitudinal data, Hibbing looks at how the career patterns of a typical House member have evolved over the last forty years. By showing that the gap between the legislative contributions of junior and senior members has grown in recent years, Hibbing contends that as members gain in seniority they become more knowledgeable, efficient, and valuable legislators. Thus he argues against congressional term limitations. Hibbing's findings illuminate other fundamental and surprising changes. House members now are as electorally secure early in their careers as they are late, and they are less likely to deviate from their previously established roll call voting pattern. Members acquire positions of authority (subcommittee chairs) more quickly than they used to, but these more rapid gains evaporate by the sixth or seventh term of service. Also, House members travel to their home districts less frequently than they did ten years ago. Congressional Careers is a fascinating portrait of the evolution of American legislators during their congressional service. It is the only study of congressional behavior that is both comprehensive and longitudinal -- valuable features in an era when congressional careerism is coming under acute public scrutiny.
Download or read book Characteristics of Congress written by Glenn R. Parker and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Constituencies and Leaders in Congress written by John Edgar Jackson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study may be the most sophisticated statistical study of legislative voting now in print. The author asks why legislators, especially U.S. senators, vote as they do. Are they influenced by their constituencies, party, committee leaders, the President? By taking a relatively short time span, the years 1961 to 1963, the author is able to give us answers far beyond any we have had before, and some rather surprising ones at that. Constituencies played a different, but more important role in senators' voting than earlier studies have shown. Senators appeared to be responding both to the opinion held by their constituents on different issues and to the intensity with which these opinions were held. On the interrelation of constituencies and party, Mr. Jackson finds that Republicans and southern Democrats were particularly influenced by their voters. The clearest cases of leadership influence were among the non-southern members of the Democratic Party. Western Republicans, on the other hand, rejected the leadership of party members for that of committee leaders. Finally, on Presidential leadership, Mr. Jackson shows that John F. Kennedy influenced senators only during the first two years of his administration. All of these findings challenge conventional wisdom and are bound to influence future work in legislative behavior.
Download or read book Participation in Congress written by Richard L. Hall and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For every issue that arises on the legislative agenda, each member of Congress must make two decisions: What position to take and how active to be. The first has been thoroughly studied. But little is understood about the second. In this landmark book, a leading scholar of congressional studies draws on extensive interviews and congressional documents to uncover when and how members of congress participate at the subcommittee, committee, and floor stages of legislative decision making. Richard L. Hall develops an original theory to account for varying levels of participation across members and issues, within House and Senate, and across pre- and postreform periods of the modern Congress. By closely analyzing behavior on sixty bills in the areas of agriculture, human resources, and commerce, Hall finds that participation at each stage of the legislative process is rarely universal and never equal. On any given issue, most members who are eligible to participate forego the opportunity to do so, leaving a self-selected few to deliberate on the policy. These active members often do not reflect the values and interests evident in their parent chamber. A deeper understanding of congressional participation, the author contends, informs related inquiries into how well members of congress represent constituents' interests, what factors influence legislative priorities, how members gain legislative leverage on specific issues, and how well collective choice in Congress meets democratic standards of representative deliberation.
