The Logic Of Congressional Action

Author : R. Douglas Arnold
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300056594
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Logic of Congressional Action written by R. Douglas Arnold and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Congress regularly enacts laws that benefit particular groups or localities while imposing costs on everyone else. Sometimes, however, Congress breaks free of such parochial concerns and enacts bills that serve the general public, not just special interest groups. In this important and original book, R. Douglas Arnold offers a theory that explains not only why special interests frequently triumph but also why the general public sometimes wins. By showing how legislative leaders build coalitions for both types of programs, he illuminates recent legislative decisions in such areas as economic, tax, and energy policy. Arnold's theory of policy making rests on a reinterpretation of the relationship between legislators' actions and their constituents' policy preferences. Most scholars explore the impact that citizens' existing policy preferences have on legislators' decisions. They ignore citizens who have no opinions because they assume that uninformed citizens cannot possibly affect legislators' choices. Arnold examines the influence of citizens' potential preferences, however, and argues that legislators also respond to these preferences in order to avoid future electoral problems. He shows how legislators estimate the political consequences of their voting decisions, taking into account both the existing preferences of attentive citizens and the potential preferences of inattentive citizens. He then analyzes how coalition leaders manipulate the legislative situation in order to make it attractive for legislators to support a general interest bill.

Author : R. Douglas Arnold
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Logic of Congressional Action written by R. Douglas Arnold and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Matthew Mark Simmons
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781423553281
Total Pages : 84 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War Powers and the Logic of Congressional Action written by Matthew Mark Simmons and published by . This book was released on 1998-12-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war powers debate that has occupied so much public attention in the decades following Vietnam has typically portrayed the Congress and the president engaged in a continuous constitutional struggle over institutional prerogatives. Although the war powers literature presents many explanations of why Congress has not been able to effectively control presidential war making, most studies seem to take one thing for granted: that Congress is motivated by a desire to do so. The present study challenges this central assumption and introduces a new methodology to examine congressional behavior during consideration of the Multinational Force in Lebanon Resolution (1983) and the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (1991). Using Douglas Arnold's Logic of Congressional Action as a model, the researcher conducts a content analysis of congressional floor debate to determine if members of Congress are also motivated by electoral calculations when deciding matters of war and peace. The results indicate that in fact, members do seem to be motivated by electoral forces. Furthermore, the study reveals that content analysis can be a useful tool that holds the potential to make a significant contribution to both the war powers literature and to models of congressional action.

Author : R. Douglas Arnold
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400849586
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability written by R. Douglas Arnold and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability is the first large-scale examination of how local media outlets cover members of the United States Congress. Douglas Arnold asks: do local newspapers provide the information citizens need in order to hold representatives accountable for their actions in office? In contrast with previous studies, which largely focused on the campaign period, he tests various hypotheses about the causes and consequences of media coverage by exploring coverage during an entire congressional session. Using three samples of local newspapers from across the country, Arnold analyzes all coverage over a two-year period--every news story, editorial, opinion column, letter, and list. First he investigates how twenty-five newspapers covered twenty-five local representatives; and next, how competing newspapers in six cities covered their corresponding legislators. Examination of an even larger sample, sixty-seven newspapers and 187 representatives, shows why some newspapers cover legislators more thoroughly than do other papers. Arnold then links the coverage data with a large public opinion survey to show that the volume of coverage affects citizens' awareness of representatives and challengers. The results show enormous variation in coverage. Some newspapers cover legislators frequently, thoroughly, and accessibly. Others--some of them famous for their national coverage--largely ignore local representatives. The analysis also confirms that only those incumbents or challengers in the most competitive races, and those who command huge sums of money, receive extensive coverage.

Author : Sean M. Theriault
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 113947300X
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Party Polarization in Congress written by Sean M. Theriault and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Samuel Kernell
Publisher : C Q Press College
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 708 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Logic of American Politics written by Samuel Kernell and published by C Q Press College. This book was released on 2006 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conveying how the American political system is both extraordinary and complex, the authors explain in a simple and straightforward way that there is a rationale embedded in the U.S. political system. This underlying logic helps students see why political institutions are structured the way they are, and why the politicians who occupy them, and the citizens who monitor and respond to their actions, behave as they do. Kernell and Jacobson analyze political institutions and practices as imperfect solutions to problems facing people who need to act collectively. Throughout the text, the authors highlight these collective action problems, including the conflict over values and interests and the costs associated with finding and agreeing on a course of action. They describe how the choices made to resolve problems at one moment affect politics in the future, long after the original issues have faded. They emphasize the strategic nature of political action, from the Framers' careful drafting of the Constitution to contemporary politicians' strategic efforts to shape policy according to their own preferences.

Author : Frances E. Lee
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022640918X
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Insecure Majorities written by Frances E. Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[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.

Author : R. Douglas Arnold
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300025920
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Congress and the Bureaucracy written by R. Douglas Arnold and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An] excellent book ...Arnold seeks to examine the interactions between members of the House of Representatives and members of the upper bureaucracy in respect to the geographical allocation of federal expenditures....The methodology employed is ingenious and persuasive."--David Fellman, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science "The best book now available on the decision-making process linking bureaucrats and congressmen....A model blending of theory and evidence, overlaid with a lot of good judgment and political sensitivity."--Richard F. Fenno, Jr. "Douglas Arnold's carefully wrought study of relations between the U.S. Representatives and selected administrative agencies is a challenging, thought-provoking, imaginative contribution that greatly enriches the field."--Herbert Kaufman "An indispensable book for political scientists studying Congress, and highly relevant for many others whose interest is in bureaucratic decision-making. The data and the methods of analysis are unique and make the work infinitely superior to previous work on this topic."--Samuel C. Patterson

Author : Howard Rosenthal
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351513796
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ideology and Congress written by Howard Rosenthal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Frances E. Lee
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226470061
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sizing Up the Senate written by Frances E. Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book raises questions about one of the key institutions of American government, the United States Senate, and should be of interest to anyone concerned with issues of representation.