Much of the scholarly work on the Tea Party movement of the last decade concentrates on the motivations and beliefs of regular participants in the movement and the political forces that drove them to organize. Scholars singled out "resentment" as the primary factor in its creation and maintenance. This work relies on and assumes much of this scholarship but focuses on a neglected area, the institutional Tea Party, specifically Tea Party legislators in the House.
Morris (Univ. of Maryland, College Park) and Gervais (UT San Antonio) question whether membership in the Tea Party caucus adequately captures all members in the movement because many who sought support from and/or attachment to Tea Party groups did not join the caucus. The authors were able to challenge
some conventional wisdom... Recommended for scholars of American politics.
Irwin L. Morris is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on a variety of topics in the fields of American politics, including political economy, public policymaking, race and ethnic politics, and Southern politics. Dr. Morris is the author of several books, including The American Presidency: An Analytical Approach (Cambridge 2010)and The Rational
Southerner: Black Mobilization, Republican Growth, and the Partisan Transformation of the American South (coauthored with M.V. Hill III and Quentin Kidd, Oxford 2012). Professor Morris has also published many articles in top ranked journals such as Legislative Studies Quarterly, Electoral Studies, American Journal of Political
Science; Public Choice, American Politics Research, Social Science Quarterly, and Political Behavior.
Bryan T. Gervais is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science & Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). In addition to his work on the Tea Party in Congress, his research focuses on the effects of exposure to political incivility and the connection between uncivil discourse and anti-deliberative attitudes. He is also the coordinator of the Digital Politics Studio at UTSA, whose mission it is to archive and analyze political elites'
social media posts. Dr. Gervais' journal publications have appeared in Political Communication; Politics, Groups, and Identities; PS: Political Science & Politics; Social Science Quarterly; the International Journal of Public Opinion Research; and the Journal of Information Technology &
Politics.