[PDF] The Politics Of Expertise In Congress eBook

Author : Bruce Allen Bimber
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 45,37 MB
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780791430590

GET BOOK

Examines the relationship between technical experts and elected officials, challenging the prevailing view about how experts become politicized by the policy process.

Author : Timothy M. LaPira
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 41,74 MB
Release : 2020-12-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 022670257X

GET BOOK

Congress today is falling short. Fewer bills, worse oversight, and more dysfunction. But why? In a new volume of essays, the contributors investigate an underappreciated reason Congress is struggling: it doesn’t have the internal capacity to do what our constitutional system requires of it. Leading scholars chronicle the institutional decline of Congress and the decades-long neglect of its own internal investments in the knowledge and expertise necessary to perform as a first-rate legislature. Today’s legislators and congressional committees have fewer—and less expert and experienced—staff than the executive branch or K Street. This leaves them at the mercy of lobbyists and the administrative bureaucracy. The essays in Congress Overwhelmed assess Congress’s declining capacity and explore ways to upgrade it. Some provide broad historical scope. Others evaluate the current decay and investigate how Congress manages despite the obstacles. Collectively, they undertake the most comprehensive, sophisticated appraisal of congressional capacity to date, and they offer a new analytical frame for thinking about—and improving—our underperforming first branch of government.

Author : Craig Volden
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 45,51 MB
Release : 2014-10-27
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0521761522

GET BOOK

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.

Author : Robert G. Kaiser
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 40,53 MB
Release : 2014-01-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0307744515

GET BOOK

A Washington Post Notable Book An eye-opening account of how Congress today really works—and how it doesn’t— Act of Congress focuses on two of the major players behind the sweeping financial reform bill enacted in response to the Great Crash of 2008: colorful, wisecracking congressman Barney Frank, and careful, insightful senator Christopher Dodd, both of whom met regularly with Robert G. Kaiser during the eighteen months they worked on the bill. In this compelling narrative, Kaiser shows how staffers play a critical role, drafting the legislation and often making the crucial deals. Kaiser’s rare insider access enabled him to illuminate the often-hidden intricacies of legislative enterprise and shows us the workings of Congress in all of its complexity, a clearer picture than any we have had of how Congress works best—or sometimes doesn’t work at all.

Author : Louis Fisher
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 48,14 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780890968215

GET BOOK

As Congress and the president battle out the federal deficit, foreign involvements, health care, and other policies of grave national import, the underlying constitutional issue is always the separation of powers doctrine. In The Politics of Shared Power, a classic text in the field of executive-legislative relations, Louis Fisher explains clearly and perceptively the points at which congressional and presidential interests converge and diverge, the institutional patterns that persist from one administration and one Congress to another, and the partisan dimensions resulting from the two-party system. Fisher also discusses the role of the courts in reviewing cases brought to them by members of Congress, the president, agency heads, and political activists, illustrating how court decisions affect the allocation of federal funds and the development and implementation of public policy. He examines how the president participates as legislator and how Congress intervenes in administrative matters. Separate chapters on the bureaucracy, the independent regulatory commissions, and the budgetary process probe these questions from different angles. The new fourth edition addresses the line item veto and its tortuous history and prospects. A chapter on war powers and foreign affairs studies executive-legislative disputes that affect global relations, including the Iran-Contra affair, the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and American presence in conflicts such as Haiti and Bosnia. An important new discussion focuses on interbranch collisions and gridlock as they have developed since 1992.

Author : Sean Gailmard
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 35,16 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0226924408

GET BOOK

Sean Gailmard is the Judith E. Gruber Associate Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. John W. Patty is associate professor of political science at Washington University.