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The political parties in Congress are as polarized as they have been in 100 years. This book examines more than 30 years of congressional history to understand how it is that the Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have become so divided. It finds that two steps were critical for this development. First, the respective parties' constituencies became more politically and ideologically aligned. Second, members ceded more power to their party leaders, who implemented procedures more frequently and with greater consequence. In fact, almost the entire rise in party polarization can be accounted for in the increasing frequency of and polarization on procedures used during the legislative process.

This article offers the first broad‐based, systematic, times‐series assessment of the gender dynamics underlying congressional retirement. We extend the body of work on gender and representation by using the congressional retirement literature to develop an argument that accounts for the gender gap in the average length of congressional service. Our results indicate that women are less willing than men to remain in Congress when their ability to influence the legislative agenda stalls. Because of women's relatively early departures from the House of Representatives, our analysis suggests that prospects for women's representation are less promising than the conventional wisdom suggests.

The conventional wisdom and congressional scholarship find that members of Congress use their public authority to facilitate their reelections (Aldrich 1995; Moe 1990; Parker 1992; Weingast and Marshall 1988). The adoption of the Pendleton Act of 1883 has been cited as another in a long line of examples in which members have “stacked the deck” in their own self‐interests (Johnson and Libecap 1994a). I challenge these pervasive views by presenting evidence that public pressure was an important and frequently overlooked factor in explaining the adoption of civil service reform in the late nineteenth century. More generally, I argue that members of Congress will enact reforms that diminish their power or restrict their authority only when the public is attentive and united; otherwise, they will establish governing structures and rules that facilitate their own reelections. This insight sheds light, more broadly, on the relationship between the represented and their representatives.