[PDF] Party Loyalty Among Congressmen eBook

Author : Nathan W. Monroe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 37,73 MB
Release : 2009-08-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0226534944

GET BOOK

Recent research on the U.S. House of Representatives largely focuses on the effects of partisanship, but the strikingly less frequent studies of the Senate still tend to treat parties as secondary considerations in a chamber that gives its members far more individual leverage than congressmen have. In response to the recent increase in senatorial partisanship, Why Not Parties? corrects this imbalance with a series of original essays that focus exclusively on the effects of parties in the workings of the upper chamber. Illuminating the growing significance of these effects, the contributors explore three major areas, including the electoral foundations of parties, partisan procedural advantage, and partisan implications for policy. In the process, they investigate such issues as whether party discipline can overcome Senate mechanisms that invest the most power in individuals and small groups; how parties influence the making of legislation and the distribution of pork; and whether voters punish senators for not toeing party lines. The result is a timely corrective to the notion that parties don’t matter in the Senate—which the contributors reveal is far more similar to the lower chamber than conventional wisdom suggests.

Author : Jeffery A. Jenkins
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 12,53 MB
Release : 2013
Category : History
ISBN : 0691156441

GET BOOK

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most powerful partisan figure in the contemporary U.S. Congress. How this came to be, and how the majority party in the House has made control of the speakership a routine matter, is far from straightforward. Fighting for the Speakership provides a comprehensive history of how Speakers have been elected in the U.S. House since 1789, arguing that the organizational politics of these elections were critical to the construction of mass political parties in America and laid the groundwork for the role they play in setting the agenda of Congress today. Jeffery Jenkins and Charles Stewart show how the speakership began as a relatively weak office, and how votes for Speaker prior to the Civil War often favored regional interests over party loyalty. While struggle, contention, and deadlock over House organization were common in the antebellum era, such instability vanished with the outbreak of war, as the majority party became an "organizational cartel" capable of controlling with certainty the selection of the Speaker and other key House officers. This organizational cartel has survived Gilded Age partisan strife, Progressive Era challenge, and conservative coalition politics to guide speakership elections through the present day. Fighting for the Speakership reveals how struggles over House organization prior to the Civil War were among the most consequential turning points in American political history.

Author : Gary W. Cox
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 23,75 MB
Release : 1993-04-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520072206

GET BOOK

This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House—especially majority parties—as a species of "legislative cartel." These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership. Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work. This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.

Author : Kathryn Pearson
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 22,36 MB
Release : 2015-08-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0472119613

GET BOOK

A breakthrough study that looks at the disciplinary measures which party leaders employ to command loyalty from members

Author : Ronald H. McDonald
Publisher :
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 13,46 MB
Release : 1957
Category : Political parties
ISBN :

GET BOOK

It is the purpose of this paper to investigate in terms of existing, observable pressures, the loyalty of an individual member of Congress to his political party. In doing so, two questions will be kept consciously in mind: first, to what degree does the Congressman demonstrate a sense of party loyalty to the leadership of his party in Congress; and, second, what is the probability that this loyalty could be increased by changing party processes so as to achieve greater party responsibility? A contention of this study will be that there is inherent in the United States a particularly strong sense of 'multi-responsibility' in the Congressman to many segments of the nation beyond the political party itself. It is this very fact which seems to preclude any actual possibility of a more greatly responsible political party. The appreciation of these multi-responsibilities was an important result of this study. ... The study will turn for most of its primary investigation to a member of Congress who has been selected to serve as an illustration in point. ... The study will show how on two major issues of 1956 the Congressman could be influenced to vote against the majority of his party and presidential leadership because of many complex (and in the final analysis perhaps undefinable) interactions of these forces and pressures which were active upon him. ... The Congressman who is being used as the basis for this study is Representative James B. Utt, of the 20th Congressional District of the State of California.