"A supplement to the Logic of American politics."

Why does the American political system work the way it does? Find the answers in The Logic of American Politics. This best-selling text arms you with a toolkit of institutional design concepts—command, veto, agenda control, voting rules, and delegation—that help you recognize how the American political system was designed and why it works the way it does. The authors build your critical thinking through a simple yet powerful idea: politics is about solving collective action problems. Thoroughly updated to account for the most recent events and data, the Ninth Edition explores the increase in political polarization, the growing emotional involvement people have to politics, Americans’ reactions to changing demographics, the partisan politics of judicial selection, and the changing nature of presidential leadership. Revised to include the 2018 election results and analysis, this edition provides you with the tools you need to make sense of today’s government.

Partisan conflict between the White House and Congress is now a dominant feature of national politics in the United States. What the Constitution sought to institute—a system of checks and balances—divided government has taken to extremes: institutional divisions so deep that national challenges like balancing the federal budget or effectively regulating the nation's savings and loans have become insurmountable. In original essays written especially for this volume, eight of the leading scholars in American government address the causes and consequences of divided party control. Their essays, written with a student audience in mind, take up such timely questions as: Why do voters consistently elect Republican presidents and Democratic congresses? How does divided control shape national policy on crucial issues such as the declaration of war? How have presidents adapted their leadership strategies to the circumstance of divided government? And, how has Congress responded in the way it writes laws and oversees departmental performance? These issues and a host of others are addressed in this compact yet comprehensive volume. The distinguished lineup of contributors promises to make this book "must" reading for both novice and serious students of elections, Congress, and the presidency.

Gridlock is not a modern legislative condition. Although the term is said to have entered the American political lexicon after the 1980 elections, Alexander Hamilton complained about it more than two hundred years ago. In many ways, stalemate seems endemic to American politics. Constitutional skeptics even suggest that the framers intentionally designed the Constitution to guarantee gridlock. In Stalemate, Sarah Binder examines the causes and consequences of gridlock, focusing on the ability of Congress to broach and secure policy compromise on significant national issues. Reviewing more than fifty years of legislative history, Binder measures the frequency of deadlock during that time and offers concrete advice for policymakers interested in improving the institutional capacity of Congress. Binder begins by revisiting the notion of "framers' intent," investigating whether gridlock was the preferred outcome of those who designed the American system of separated powers. Her research suggests that frequent policy gridlock might instead be an unintended consequence of constitutional design. Next, she explores the ways in which elections and institutions together shape the capacity of Congress and the president to make public law. She examines two facets of its institutional evolution: the emergence of the Senate as a coequal legislative partner of the House and the insertion of political parties into a legislative arena originally devoid of parties. Finally, she offers a new empirical approach for testing accounts of policy stalemate during the decades since World War II. These measurements reveal patterns in legislative performance during the second half of the twentieth century, showing the frequency of policy deadlock and the legislative stages at which it has most often emerged in the postwar period. Binder uses the new measure of stalemate to explain empirical patterns in the frequency of gridlock. The results weave together the effects of institu

Over its long lifetime, "political economy" has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical processes for Marx; the study of the inter-relationship between economics and politics for some twentieth-century commentators; and for others, a methodology emphasizing individual rationality (the economic or "public choice" approach) or institutional adaptation (the sociological version). This Handbook views political economy as a grand (if imperfect) synthesis of these various strands, treating political economy as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behavior and institutions. This Handbook surveys the field of political economy, with 58 chapters ranging from micro to macro, national to international, institutional to behavioral, methodological to substantive. Chapters on social choice, constitutional theory, and public economics are set alongside ones on voters, parties and pressure groups, macroeconomics and politics, capitalism and democracy, and international political economy and international conflict.

More than many areas of American politics research, studies of minor party competition and success are often overly driven by normative concerns that do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. This concise book presents a concerted effort to analyze the barriers in election law, such as ballot access restrictions and single member districts with a plurality rule, that prevent third parties from gaining a durable hold in American politics. Rather than trudge through yet another history of third parties in America or polemical arguments for minor party inclusion, Schraufnagel provides empirical grounding for the claims of third party backers. This thoughtful analysis demonstrates that the inclusion of third parties improves electoral participation rates and that third party involvement in the legislative process is linked to landmark legislative productivity. In the end, the work provides thoughtful suggestions on the types of reforms that would lead to greater third party success in American elections.

Annotation. American presidents enter office ready to enact a policy-making agenda that will satisfy partisan interests and facilitate reelection to a second term. Economic circumstances, however, may catch presidents in a vicious cycle of economic growth and inflation versus recession and unemployment. Faced with responsibility for the nation's economic health, presidents are often forced to make tradeoffs between pursuing political objectives and stabilizing the economy. Vicious Cycle provides a theoretical framework for explaining how presidents pursue partisan and electoral objectives in office while simultaneously managing the nation's economy. With an approach that bridges several literatures in presidential studies and political economy, Constantine J. Spiliotes develops an econometric model of postwar presidential decision making in the American political economy and examines its relationship to economic decision making in four presidencies. These extensively documented case studies -- of presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, and Reagan -- offer variation across several analytic dimensions: temporal, partisan, electoral, and institutional. Spiliotes concludes that tradeoffs between political objectives and institutional responsibility are driven by a transformation in the nature of the American presidency, from an office in which decision making is anchored in partisan accountability to one constrained by the chief executive's institutional mission. Spiliotes's work contributes to a fuller understanding of the presidency and political economy and the methodologies that elucidate them.

This book aims to explain why some presidents are more successful than others in winning the support of legislators during periods of unified government. This book covers five presidential and semi-presidential systems such as France, Indonesia, Mexico, Taiwan, and the U.S. with a wide variety of institutional arrangements and political dynamics. This book elaborates on explaining how institutional factors such as confidence vote, electoral system, candidate nomination and presidential unilateral power influence the ability of presidents to pass their legislative agendas through comparisons across presidential and semi-presidential systems.

Was 1992 a realigning election? Did the midterm elections of 1994 realign the realignment? Will 1996 carry the United States forward on yet another changed trajectory? In this volume of original essays, leading political scientists examine key components of the American agenda and assess the current administration's position in light of historical precedents and future trends. Each conclusion is unique, born of a combination of the empirical record and its interpretation, but essays by Bryan Jones and Larry Dodd help to put the wide-ranging views represented here in long-term perspective.