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 Speakershipprovides 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 Speakershipreveals how struggles over House organization prior to the Civil War were among the most consequential turning points in American political history.
This book examines how the constitutional requirements of the lawmaking process, combined with the factional divisions within parties, affect US representatives' decisions about how to distribute ...power among themselves. The incorporation of the presidential, senatorial, and House factions in the analysis of House rule making marks an important departure from previous theories, which analyze the House as an institution that makes laws in isolation. This book argues that, by constitutional design, the success of the House in passing legislation is highly contingent on the actions of the Senate and the president; and therefore, also by constitutional design, House members must anticipate such actions when they design their rules. An examination of major rule changes from 1879 to 2013 finds that changes in the preferences of constitutional actors outside the House, as well as the political alignment of these political actors vis-à-vis House factions, are crucial for predicting the timing and directionality of rule changes.
Creating the Constitution presents a different interpretation of the Convention and the First Congress, derived largely from a close reading of Farrand's Records and the Annals of Congress . Among ...its special features are a critical perspective on the Framers, an examination of Court Whig influence on the Federalists, the identification of a third group—the state Federalists—between the nationalists and states' righters, and a view of the First Congress as distorting the aims of the Convention.
The United States Congress has been described as dysfunctional, gridlocked, polarized, hyperpartisan, chaotic, and do-nothing. In Changing Cultures in Congress, Donald R. Wolfensberger explains the ...institutional dynamics behind Congress's devolution to a body plagued by a win-at-any-cost mentality and a culture of perpetual campaigning.
Bayesian methods are being increasingly employed in many different areas of research in the physical sciences. In astrophysics, models are used to make predictions to be compared to observations. ...These observations offer information that is incomplete and uncertain, so the comparison has to be pursued by following a probabilistic approach. With contributions from leading experts, this volume covers the foundations of Bayesian inference, a description of computational methods, and recent results from their application to areas such as exoplanet detection and characterisation, image reconstruction, and cosmology. It appeals to both young researchers seeking to learn about Bayesian methods as well as to astronomers wishing to incorporate these approaches in their research areas. It provides the next generation of researchers with the tools of modern data analysis that are already becoming standard in current astrophysical research.
How did southern members of Congress remade the United States in their own image after the Civil War? No question has loomed larger in the American experience than the role of the South. Southern ...Nation examines how southern members of Congress shaped national public policy and American institutions from Reconstruction to the New Deal--and along the way remade the region and the nation in their own image. The central paradox of southern politics was how such a highly diverse region could be transformed into a coherent and unified bloc-a veritable nation within a nation that exercised extraordinary influence in politics. This book shows how this unlikely transformation occurred in Congress, the institutional site where the South's representatives forged a new relationship with the rest of the nation. Drawing on an innovative theory of southern lawmaking, in-depth analyses of key historical sources, and congressional data, Southern Nation traces how southern legislators confronted the dilemma of needing federal investment while opposing interference with the South's racial hierarchy, a problem they navigated with mixed results before choosing to prioritize white supremacy above all else. Southern Nation reveals how southern members of Congress gradually won for themselves an unparalleled role in policymaking, and left all southerners-whites and blacks-disadvantaged to this day. At first, the successful defense of the South's capacity to govern race relations left southern political leaders locally empowered but marginalized nationally. With changing rules in Congress, however, southern representatives soon became strategically positioned to profoundly influence national affairs.
The second edition of Legislative Leviathan provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Re-evaluating the role of parties and ...committees, Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel'. These cartels seize the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Most of the cartel's efforts are focused on securing control of the legislative agenda for its members. The first edition of this book had significant influence on the study of American politics and is essential reading for students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.
