Why do majority congressional parties seem unable to act as an effective policy-making force? They routinely delegate their power to others internally to standing committees and subcommittees within each chamber, externally to the president and to the bureaucracy. Conventional wisdom in political science insists that such delegation leads inevitably to abdication usually by degrees, sometimes precipitously, but always completely.
In "The Logic of Delegation," however, D. Roderick Kiewiet and Mathew D. McCubbins persuasively argue that political scientists have paid far too much attention...

Although a great deal is known about the United States Congress, the differences and similarities between it and the legislatures and parliaments of other countries have not been extensively studied. This book--by a distinguished group of legislative specialists from ten countries--fills this gap by presenting legislative research from a comparative, cross-national perspective.
Consisting of fourteen essays, this volume incorporates major areas of legislative research, including studies of recruitment of legislators and an overview of their careers, the evolution of legislatures, and the...