Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress
The Lawmakers

This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means.

Craig Volden (Author), Alan E. Wiseman (Author)

9780521761529, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 2014

260 pages, 24 b/w illus. 28 tables
23.1 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.49 kg

'By devising and applying a thoughtful new measure of legislative effectiveness, this landmark study fundamentally recasts methodological individualism. Members of Congress are certainly single-minded seekers of re-election. But they are also lawmakers. The elegance of Volden and Wiseman's reframing will change how we view Congress and parliamentary skill - and quite possibly restore our faith in Congress. Their book richly deserves a place in undergraduate and graduate courses on Congress, leadership, and methods.' Rick Valelly, Claude C. Smith '14 Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College

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.

1. Introduction
2. Measuring legislative effectiveness
3. The keys to majority-party effectiveness in Congress
4. A tale of three minorities
5. Gridlock and effective lawmaking, issue by issue
6. The habits of highly effective lawmakers
7. The future of legislative effectiveness.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]