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
inquiries into Congress, the presidency, the bureaucracy, and the courts, the
contributors show how laws are born, mutate, and die, as well as 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 it was recently published by the
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, and it was recently published by Princeton
University Press (October 2012). Here
is a link to the book’s Amazon page.
A third project,
co-edited with Sidney Milkis (UVA), examines the politics of major policy
reform in the post-World War II United States.
Although the volume does not presume to cover all important policy
arenas, it includes discussion of nine critical issues, spanning civil rights,
social welfare, trade, immigration, and national security, that offer a
comprehensive understanding of how major breakthroughs are achieved, stifled,
or compromised in a political system conventionally understood as resistant to
major changes. The title of the book is The
Politics of Major Policy Reform in Postwar America, and it is under
contract on Cambridge University Press. Here is the volume’s table of
contents.
A fourth 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.
A fifth project examines
how the issue of civil rights for black Americans has been dealt with in the
U.S. Congress from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 through the present
day. The book will take a historical
approach and detail how the U.S. Congress has struggled with civil rights
issues across different eras in the Nation’s history: from Reconstruction
through Redemption, when blacks were first empowered and then reduced to
second-class citizens; across the bleak period of the late-19th and early-20th
centuries, when Congress was almost wholly unreceptive to black
Americans’ plight and civil rights policy reached a post-1863 low point;
through different phases of the post-World War I era, when blacks made slow and
steady progress in generating a civil rights agenda in Congress, culminating in
the landmark Acts of 1964 and 1965 (and their subsequent Extensions and
Amendments). The book is entitled Congress
and Civil Rights: A Political-Economic History, and it is under
contract on Princeton University Press. Here
is the book proposal, complete with a chapter outline.
Finally, a sixth 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.