Issue Politics in Congress

ISBN-13: 9780521671323 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 222 str.

Tracy Sulkin

Opis

Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? This study, exploring how legislators' experiences as candidates shape their subsequent behavior as policymakers, demonstrates that winning legislators regularly take up their challengers' priority issues from the last campaign and act on them. This attentiveness to their challengers' issues reflects a widespread and systematic yet largely unrecognized mode of responsiveness in the U.S. Congress. Tracy Sulkin reveals the important benefits for these legislators as well as the health and legitimacy of the representative process.

Recenzje

"....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

Spis treści

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.