The Limits of Party
Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era
200 pages
|
46 line drawings, 15 tables
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6 x 9
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© 2020
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
One / Majority Party Capacity in a Polarized Era
Two / The Persistence of Bipartisan Lawmaking
Three / Why Do Majority Parties Fail?
Four / How Do Majority Parties Succeed?
Five / Bipartisanship and the Decline of Regular Order
Six / Credit Claiming and Blaming: How Members React to Legislation in Public
Seven / Constancy and Continuities
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Majority Party Agenda Priorities
Appendix B. Additional Quantitative Analyses
Appendix C. Notes on the Interviews
Notes
References
Index
Two / The Persistence of Bipartisan Lawmaking
Three / Why Do Majority Parties Fail?
Four / How Do Majority Parties Succeed?
Five / Bipartisanship and the Decline of Regular Order
Six / Credit Claiming and Blaming: How Members React to Legislation in Public
Seven / Constancy and Continuities
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Majority Party Agenda Priorities
Appendix B. Additional Quantitative Analyses
Appendix C. Notes on the Interviews
Notes
References
Index
Review Quotes
David Mayhew, Yale University
“The Limits of Party a powerful and authoritative work that should invest our understandings and our classrooms. The book is rich in data and argument. The authors ask: How much has congressional lawmaking changed during recent decades? The answer: Not as much as we might think! There is an awful lot of continuity in our cumbersome separation-of-powers system.”
Tracy Sulkin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“In this provocative and cogently-argued book, Curry and Lee demonstrate convincingly the very real limits of congressional majority party power. While contemporary congressional politics may be marked by highly partisan and centralized processes, the factors that govern lawmaking and legislative outcomes have remain largely unchanged over the past half-century. The authors show that laws are generally enacted with broad bipartisan support, and majority parties still face struggles to coordinate internally, even though they face fewer ideological divides than in the past. This important book adds nuance to the literature on party influence and serves as a meaningful corrective to arguments that polarization has changed everything about Congress. It will be deservedly widely read and discussed.”
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Political Science: American Government and Politics
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