Legislative Entrepreneurship in the U.S. House of Representatives (Michigan Studies in Political Analysis)

When members are elected to the House of Representatives they have a certain freedom to decide how they will act as members and how they will build their reputations. Just as in the market place entrepreneurs build businesses, so in the House of Representatives members have the freedom to choose to build legislative programs that will enhance their reputations in the institution. And yet entrepreneurship is also costly to members. Gregory Wawro explains why members of the House engage in legislative entrepreneurship by examining what motivates them to acquire policy knowledge, draft legislation, build coalitions, and push their legislation in the House. He considers what incentives members have to perform what many have perceived to be the difficult and unrewarding tasks of legislating.This book shows how becoming a legislative entrepreneur relates to members' goals of reelection, enacting good public policy, and obtaining influence in the House. The analysis differs from previous studies of this behavior, which for the most part have employed case study methods and have relied on anecdotal evidence to support their arguments. Wawro analyzes legislative entrepreneurship in a general and systematic fashion, developing hypotheses from rational-choice-based theories and testing these hypotheses using quantitative methods.Wawro argues that members engage in legislative entrepreneurship in order to get ahead within the House. He finds that the more legislative entrepreneurship that members engage in, the more likely it is that they will advance to prestigious positions.This book is of interest to students of Congress, legislative behavior and institutions, elections, and campaign finance.Gregory Wawro is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.

Legislative Entrepreneurship in the U.S. House of Representatives (Michigan Studies In Political Analysis)

Business & Money

Wawro, Gregory

Business Development & Entrepreneurship

University of Michigan Press

Univ of Michigan Pr

Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate (Princeton Studies in American Politics)

Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the "filibuster," has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate.
 What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into parliamentary chaos. They show that institutional patterns of behavior induced by inherited rules did not render Senate rules immune from fundamental changes.
 The authors' theoretical arguments are supported through a combination of extensive quantitative and case-study analysis, which spans a broad swath of history. They consider how changes in the larger institutional and political context--such as the expansion of the country and the move to direct election of senators--led to changes in the Senate regarding debate rules. They further investigate the impact these changes had on the functioning of the Senate. The book concludes with a discussion relating battles over obstruction in the Senate's past to recent conflicts over judicial nominations.

Politics & Social Sciences

Schickler, Eric

Politics & Government

Princeton University Press

Time Counts: Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science

How to study the past using data Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science advances historical research in the social sciences by bridging the divide between qualitative and quantitative analysis. Gregory Wawro and Ira Katznelson argue for an expansion of the standard quantitative methodological toolkit with a set of innovative approaches that better capture nuances missed by more commonly used statistical methods. Demonstrating how to employ such promising tools, Wawro and Katznelson address the criticisms made by prominent historians and historically oriented social scientists regarding the shortcomings of mainstream quantitative approaches for studying the past. Traditional statistical methods have been inadequate in addressing temporality, periodicity, specificity, and context--features central to good historical analysis. To address these shortcomings, Wawro and Katznelson argue for the application of alternative approaches that are particularly well-suited to incorporating these features in empirical investigations. The authors demonstrate the advantages of these techniques with replications of research that locate structural breaks and uncover temporal evolution. They develop new practices for testing claims about path dependence in time-series data, and they discuss the promise and perils of using historical approaches to enhance causal inference. Opening a dialogue among traditional qualitative scholars and applied quantitative social scientists focusing on history, Quantitative Analysis for Historical Social Science illustrates powerful ways to move historical social science research forward.

Katznelson, Ira

History

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