Book Projects:
A first project, co-edited with Eric Patashnik (UVA), considers
legislation to be a living, breathing force in American politics: laws shape
the growth of the state, animate the bureaucracy, and determine what policy
ideas are translated into action. Laws have a life before adoption, when
they are merely proposals advancing on the agenda, as well as after enactment,
when they may generate durable legacies that channel the political
possibilities of the future. Yet many scholars treat legislation as a
static factor in American politics, restricting attention to the initial moment
when bills are signed. This volume adopts a developmental view of
legislation to produce fresh insights into contemporary American
politics. Ranging from inquires into Congress, the presidency, the
bureaucracy, and the courts, the contributors show how laws are born, mutate,
and die. Bringing together the work of some of the leading scholars in
the field, this volume includes essays that explore how laws emerge from and
remake coalitional structures, mediate partisan conflicts, and interact with
broader shifts in the political environment. The title of the book is Living
Legislation: Durability, Change, and the Politics of American Law Making,
and is forthcoming on
A second project,
co-authored with Charles Stewart (MIT), examines the rise of mass parties and
the institutionalization of the House organization across time. In particular, we examine how the majority
party in the House came to consolidate its hold on the nodes of power in the
chamber, specifically the Speakership.
We take it for granted today that the majority party organizes the
House, but this was not always so.
Lengthy battles over the House’s organization occurred in the
antebellum era, with speakership fights sometimes raging for months. On occasion the majority party would lose the
speakership, or another valuable House office, to a minority-based
coalition. Only with the Civil War and
the rise of congressional party caucuses did the majority party develop a stranglehold
on the organization of the House. The
title of the book is Fighting for the Speakership: The House and
Rise of Party Government, which is forthcoming on Princeton University
Press (October 2012). Here is a
general (and somewhat dated) outline of the chapters.
A third project is a
book in the New Institutionalism in American Politics series, on W. W. Norton
Press, edited by Kenneth A. Shepsle. The
book is entitled Analyzing Parties, which will stand alongside other books in
the series like Analyzing Congress
(by Charles Stewart of MIT), Analyzing
Policy (by Michael Munger of Duke University), Analyzing Interest Groups (by Scott Ainsworth of the University of
Georgia), and Analyzing Elections (by
Rebecca Morton of NYU). Here
is a general outline of the chapters.
Finally, a fourth
project deals with the subject of party effects and the American Civil War,
which is an extension of some of my early articles-based research. This is on the back burner right now, while I finish other projects,
but the book will be entitled Investigating the Effects of Party:
Congressional Politics and the American Civil War. It will tackle the question that has vexed
the Congress literature over the last decade and a half: do parties matter in the internal politics of
Congress? I will argue that Civil War
politics provides a perfect “natural experiment” to test for party
effects, because the Confederacy was nearly identical to the United States in
all institutional facets, except that a strong two-party system
flourished in the U.S. while a party system did not exist in the
Confederacy. Thus, the effects of party
on congressional decision making can be isolated and assessed. In addition to revisiting some of my earlier
work on the subject, I will conduct a new set of analyses and develop some
comprehensive case studies. Here is
a general outline of the chapters.