Representation is integral to the study of legislatures, yet virtually no attention has been given to how representative assemblies developed and what that process might tell us about how the relationship between the representative and the represented evolved. The Rise of the Representative corrects that omission by tracing the development of representative assemblies in colonial America and revealing they were a practical response to governing problems, rather than an imported model or an attempt to translate abstract philosophy into a concrete reality. Peverill Squire shows there...

Examines the factors that make women politicians more electorally vulnerable than their male counterparts. These factors combine to convince women that they must work harder to win elections - a phenomenon that Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt term ""gendered vulnerability"".

Investigates whether legislators in earlier historical eras were motivated by many of the same factors that influence their behaviour today, especially with regard to the pursuit of reelection. In this respect, they examine the role of electoral incentives in shaping legislative behaviour across a wide swath of the nineteenth century.