Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress The Lawmakers

This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Congress, the successes or failures of women and African Americans in Congress, policy gridlock, and the specific strategies that lawmakers employ to advance their agendas.

1. Introduction; 2. Measuring legislative effectiveness; 3. The keys to majority-party effectiveness in Congress; 4. A tale of three minorities; 5. Gridlock and effective lawmaking, issue by issue; 6. The habits of highly effective lawmakers; 7. The future of legislative effectiveness.

Craig Volden is Professor of Public Policy and Politics, with appointments in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics, at the University of Virginia. He has published numerous articles in such journals as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism. Volden is co-author (with David W. Brady) of Revolving Gridlock: Politics and Policy from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush (2006).
Alan E. Wiseman is Associate Professor of Political Science, with a secondary appointment in Law, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He is the author of The Internet Economy: Access, Taxes, and Market Structure (2000).