Issue Politics in Congress

This book explores how legislators respond to their electoral challengers' critiques.

Tracy Sulkin (Author)

9780521671323, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 10 October 2005

222 pages, 26 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.33 kg

"....Tracy Sulkin examines legislators' actions on their own and on their opponents' campaign issues and in doing so provides new and important insights into the ways in which campaigns affect governing and incumbents use their opportunities in office to secure their reelection....this book is exploratory....Issue Politics in Congress will be a substantial contribution to the literature because it goes to the core of the nature of republican democracy....It is an extremely creative and meticulous empirical approach to studying representation..."
--Eric S. Heberlig, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Political Science Quarterly

Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? This study, one of the first to explore how legislators' experiences as candidates shape their subsequent behavior as policy makers, demonstrates that they do. Winning legislators regularly take up their challengers' priority issues from the last campaign and act on them in office, a phenomenon called 'issue uptake'. This attentiveness to their challengers' issues reflects a widespread and systematic yet largely unrecognized mode of responsiveness in the US Congress, but it is one with important benefits for the legislators who undertake it and for the health and legitimacy of the representative process. This book provides fresh insight into questions regarding the electoral connection in legislative behavior, the role of campaigns and elections, and the nature and quality of congressional representation.

1. Electoral challenges and legislative responsiveness
2. A theory of issue uptake
3. The nature of campaign and legislative agendas
4. Assessing uptake
5. Who responds?: explaining individual variation in uptake
6. Patterns of responsiveness in congress
7. The electoral impacts of uptake
8. Uptake and public policy
9. Elections, governance, and representation.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Regional studies [GTB]