The United States Congress, How It Works and For Whom

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:

I'm starting to do research on this, Heaven help me, as an exercise in network analysis.

July 2022: That sentence, and most of these references, date back to 2005--2006. Obviously a lot has changed since then, and if I keep updating this notebook with the same frequency even more may change by the time you read this.

James Fowler
- "Legislative Cosponsorship Networks in the U.S. House and Senate," Social Networks forthcoming [Short version of the conference paper "Who is the Best Connected Congressperson?" PDF]
- "Who is the Best Connected Congressperson? A Study of Legislative Cosponsorship Networks" [Long version of the journal paper. PDF]
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center
Kenneth T. Poole, "Recent Developments in Analytical Models of Voting in the U.S. Congress", Legislative Studies Quarterly 13 (1988): 117--133
Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, M. E. J. Newman and Casey M. Warmbrand, "A network analysis of committees in the U.S. House of Representatives", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 102 (2005): 7057--7062 [PDF reprint via Mark]
Frank J. Sorauf, Inside Campaign Finance: Myths and Realities [Good, but I found it vexing to read this 1992-vintage book in 2006 — I kept wanting to know what he thought about the last 14 years!]

Justin H. Gross, Cues and Heuristics on Capital Hill: Relational Decision-Making in the United States Senate [Ph.D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 2010; I had the pleasure of being on Dr. Gross's thesis committee, and collaborating with him on some of the work]

Justin H. Gross and CRS, "Cosponsorship in the US Senate: A Multilevel Approach to Detecting the Subtle Influence of Social Relational Factors in Legislative Behavior" [Unpublished MS]

Brad Alexander, "Good Money and Bad Money: Do Funding Sources Affect Electoral Outcomes?", Political Research Quarterly 58 (2005): 353--358
E. Scott Adler, Why Congressional Reforms Fail: Reelection and the House Committee System
E. Scott Adler and John S. Lapinski (eds.), Macropolitics of Congress
R. Douglas Arnold
- Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability
- The Logic of Congressional Action
Joseph M. Bessette, The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government [I must confess that, like many Americans, my inclination is to scoff at the idea of Congress as a deliberative body. But Bessette supposedly has empirical evidence, which trumps cynicism. On the other hand, this was published in 1994, when I was, well, embarrassingly young; things may have been different then.]
Thomas L. Brunell, "The Relationship Between Political Parties and Interest Groups: Explaining Patterns of PAC Contributions to Candidates for Congress", Political Research Quarterly 58 (2005): 681--688
Barry C. Burden, Gregory A. Caldeira and Tim Groseclose, "Measuring Ideologies of U.S. Senators: The Song Remains the Same", Legislative Studies Quarterly 25 (2000): 237--258
Gary Cox and Matthew McCubbins, Legislative LeviathanMichael X. Delli Carpini, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters
Elizabeth Drew, The Corruption of American Politics
Amihai Glazer, "Predicting Committe Action" [Abstract: "Success of a policy often requires both that a good policy be adopted, and that the public or firms correctly anticipate what policy government will adopt. This paper models a relation between committee size and the effectiveness of policy, with a focus on how the accuracy of the public's expectations varies with the size of the governmental committee setting policy. The paper also argues that the demand for access by special interest groups may arise not from a desire to influence policy, but from a desire to learn about government's likely actions." PDF preprint via RePEc, via Bill Tozier.]
Tim Groseclose, "An Examination of the Market for Favors and Votes in Congress", Economic Inquiry 34 (1996): 320--340
Richard L. Hall, Participation in Congress
John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Congress as Public Enemy: Public Attitudes Toward American Political Institutions
Kristin Kanthak, "Top-Down Divergence: The Effect of Party-Determined Power on Candidate Ideological Placement", journal Of Theoretical Politics 14 (2002): 301--323
Roderick Kiewiet and Matthew McCubbins,
John W. Kingdon, "Models of Legislative Voting", Journal of Politics 39 (1977): 563--595
Keith Krehbiel, Information and Legislative Organization
Steven D. Levitt, "How Do Senators Vote? Disentangling the Role of Voter Preferences, Party Affiliation, and Senator Ideology", The American Economic Review 86 (1996): 425--441
David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection
Gary Mucciaroni and Paul J. Quirk, Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress
Anthony Nownes, Total Lobbying: What Lobbyists Want (and How They Try to Get It)
Nelson W. Polsby, How Congress Evolves: The Social Bases of Institutional Change
Annelise Russell, Tweeting is Leading: How Senators Communicate and Represent in the Age of Twitter
Eric Schickler, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress
Kenneth W. Shotts, "Does Racial Redistricting Cause Conservative Policy Outcomes? Policy Preferences of Southern Representatives in the 1980s and 1990s", The Journal of Politics 65 (2003): 216--226
James M. Snyder, Jr. and Tim Groseclose, "Estimating Party Influence in Congressional Roll-Call Voting", American Journal of Political Sceince 44 (2000): 193--211
Michele L. Swers, The Difference Women Make: The Policy Impact of Women in Congress
Andrew Scott Waugh, Liuyi Pei, James H. Fowler, Peter J. Mucha, Mason Alexander Porter, "Party Polarization in Congress: A Social Networks Approach", SSRN/1437055
Julian E. Zelizer, On Capital Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948--2000