Description
CAMBRIDGE Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress The Lawmakers 2015 Edition by Craig Volden, Alan E. Wiseman
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. Table of contents :- 1. Introduction; 2. Measuring legislative effectiveness; 3. The keys to majority-party effectiveness in Congress; 4. A tale of three minorities; 5. Gridlock and effective lawmaking, issue by issue; 6. The habits of highly effective lawmakers; 7. The future of legislative effectiveness.