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"United States. Congress Rules and practice."
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A Year Inside the Beltway: Making Economic Policy in Washington
American domestic and international economic policymaking is a sometimes bewildering mixture of economic expertise and political interests. Headlee elucidates the pivotal debates of the 2000-2001 economic policymaking cycle by walking readers through the major institutions and introducing the key actors involved. A section on domestic policy starts with a chapter on the state of the U.S. economy, followed by chapters on making fiscal policy, monetary policy, and labor policy. Each of these chapters on making policy is illustrated by case studies on Social Security reform, the Federal Reserve as financial crisis manager, and women and the economy. The international policy section starts with a chapter on the state of the global economy, followed by chapters on making trade policy, international monetary and financial policy at the U.S. Treasury, reforming the IMF, and the economic development of China. A useful introduction to the ins and outs of beltway policymaking for students of economics, politics, and policymaking.
eBook
Agenda setting in the U.S. Senate : costly consideration and majority party advantage
\"This book proposes a new theory of Senate agenda setting that reconciles a divide in literature between the conventional wisdom - in which party power is thought to be mostly, if not completely, undermined by Senate procedures and norms - and the apparent partisan bias in Senate decisions noted in recent empirical studies. Chris Den Hartog and Nathan W, Monroe's theory revolves around a \"costly consideration\" framework for thinking about agenda setting, where moving proposals forward through the legislative process is seen as requiring scarce resources. To establish that the majority party pays lower agenda consideration costs through various procedural advantages, the book features a number of chapters examining partisan influence at several stages of the legislative process, including committee reports, filibusters and cloture, floor scheduling, and floor amendments. Not only do the results strongly support the book's theoretical assumption and key hypotheses, but they shed new light on virtually every major step in the Senate's legislative process\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
The floor in Congressional life
The House and the Senate floors are the only legislative forums where all members of the U.S. Congress participate and each has a vote. Andrew J. Taylor explores why floor power and floor rights in the House are more restricted than in the Senate and how these restrictions affect the legislative process. After tracing the historical development of floor rules, Taylor assesses how well they facilitate a democratic legislative process-that is, how well they facilitate deliberation, transparency, and widespread participation.
Taylor not only compares floor proceedings between the Senate and the House in recent decades; he also compares recent congressional proceedings with antebellum proceedings. This unique, systematic analysis reveals that the Senate is generally more democratic than the House-a somewhat surprising result, given that the House is usually considered the more representative and responsive of the two. Taylor concludes with recommendations for practical reforms designed to make floor debates more robust and foster representative democracy.
eBook
Turning the legislative thumbscrew
The use of filibusters in the U.S. Senate by small numbers of members to prevent legislative action apparently desired by a majority of the members—as evidenced by the battles over civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s—is legendary. Similar situations have existed in other legislative bodies over time. The fear that they will at some time be in the minority has inhibited actions by the majority groups to control the right of minority groups to block legislative action. And yet from time to time the majority in a legislative body has forced a change in the rules to control the rights of the minority. When does the majority seek to limit minority rights to obstruct legislation? Douglas Dion, in a unique study, develops a formal model to set out the conditions under which majorities will limit minority rights. He finds that when majorities are small, they will be more cohesive. This majority cohesion leads to minority obstruction, which in turn leads to majority efforts to force procedural change to control the ability of the minority to obstruct legislation. Dion then tests his findings in a rich consideration of historical cases from the nineteenth-century U.S. House of Representatives, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. Senate, the British House of Commons, and an account of the Austro-Hungarian Parliament written by Mark Twain. Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew is a work that combines formal analysis with extensive historical evidence to address an important problem in democratic theory. Specialists in legislative politics and American political development, as well as those more broadly interested in the relationship between democratic theory and institutional structure, will find the work of great interest.
eBook
On parliamentary war : partisan conflict and procedural change in the US Senate
\"Dysfunction in the contemporary Senate is driven by the deteriorating relationship between the majority and minority parties in the institution. In this environment, regular order is virtually non-existent and unorthodox parliamentary procedures are frequently needed to pass important legislation. This is because Democrats and Republicans are now fighting a parliamentary war in the Senate to help steer the future direction of the country. James Wallner presents a new, bargaining model of procedural change to better explain the persistence of the filibuster in the current polarized environment, and focuses on the dynamics ultimately responsible for the nature and direction of contested procedural change. Wallner's model explains why Senate majorities have historically tolerated the filibuster, even when it has been used to defeat their agenda, despite having the power to eliminate it unilaterally at any point. It also improves understanding of why the then-Democratic majority chose to depart from past practice when they utilized the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster for one of President Barack Obama's judicial nominees in 2013. On Parliamentary War's game-theoretic approach provides a more accurate understanding of the relationship between partisan conflict and procedural change in the contemporary Senate\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Setting the Agenda
Scholars of the U.S. House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional organization serves members' non-partisan goals. On the other hand, partisan theories argue that the House is organized to serve the collective interests of the majority party. This book advances our partisan theory and presents a series of empirical tests of that theory's predictions (pitted against others). It considers why procedural cartels form, arguing that agenda power is naturally subject to cartelization in busy legislatures. It argues that the majority party has cartelized agenda power in the U.S. House since the adoption of Reed's rules in 1890. The evidence demonstrates that the majority party seizes agenda control at nearly every stage of the legislative process in order to prevent bills that the party dislikes from reaching the floor.
eBook