The Dysfunctional Congress

Binder, Sarah A.

doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-110813-032156

Cited by 95 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Indeed, while the US Congress is often criticized as gridlocked and paralyzed (e.g. Binder , ; Chiou & Rothenberg ; cf. Chafetz ; Teter ), the Israeli Knesset is often criticized for the opposite problem: hyperactive legislation (Chazan ; Friedberg ; Bar‐Siman‐Tov ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance: An empirical study

Bar-Siman-Tov

2017

Regulation & Governance

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This article presents the findings of an extensive multi‐method empirical study that explored the relationship between temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance. Temporary (or “sunset”) legislation – statutory provisions enacted for a limited time and set to expire unless their validity is extended – is often hailed as a key tool for promoting experimental and better regulation. Despite the importance of temporary legislation and the burgeoning theoretical scholarship on the subject, there is still a dearth of empirical studies about how temporary legislation is used in practice. The lack of empirical evidence creates a lacuna in at least three areas of theoretical scholarship, concerning temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance. This paper is a first step to fill this gap.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance: An empirical study

Bar-Siman-Tov

2017

Regulation & Governance

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“…Anti-establishment politics are not new (Horwitz, 2013;Barr, 2009) and can currently be observed both in the conservative right with the Tea Party members (Boykoff and Laschever, 2011;Skocpol and Williamson, 2012), as well as in the liberal left (Bolton, 2016). However, members of Congress become institutionalized and their behaviour is shaped by their institution (Binder, 2015;Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 1995;Canon, 1989) even as they campaign as outsiders (Herrnson, 2007;Burden, 2004). The literature provides evidence that members become more alike the more time they spend in the institution (Cox and McCubbins, 2005) and that general election competition exerts pressure towards convergence (Hirano et al, 2010).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Rhetoric Through the Lens of Non-Parametric Statistics: are Our Legislators that Different?

Iliev

Huang²,

Gel³

2018

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society

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Summary We present a novel statistical analysis of legislative rhetoric in the US Senate that sheds a light on hidden patterns in the behaviour of Senators as a function of their time in office. Using natural language processing, we create a novel comprehensive data set based on the speeches of all Senators who served on the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 2001–2011. We develop a new measure of congressional speech, based on Senators’ attitudes towards the dominant energy interests. To evaluate intrinsically dynamic formation of groups among Senators, we adopt a model‐free unsupervised space–time data mining algorithm that has been proposed in the context of tracking dynamic clusters in environmental georeferenced data streams. Our approach based on a two‐stage hybrid supervised–unsupervised learning methodology is innovative and data driven and transcends conventional disciplinary borders. We discover that legislators become much more alike after the first few years of their term, regardless of their partisanship and campaign promises.

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“…Yet these strategies have not produced consistent majoritarian results. Strong partisanship in the House has not been matched by party unity, and in the Senate, the tradition of individualism, while weakened, is still influential (Binder ).…”

Section: Insurmountable?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Is the U.S. Congress an Insurmountable Obstacle to Any “Far‐Sighted Conception of Budgeting”?

Meyers

2017

Public Budgeting & Finance

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In recent years, Congress has recurrently failed to meet its minimum responsibilities in federal budgeting. This article analyzes whether it is possible to repair this problem, using concepts popularized by Allen Schick in his influential article “The Road to PPB.” His article compared the PPB reform effort to the history of budget process reforms that started with the design of the executive budget. It publicized a logical sequence of budget process improvements that started with control and then advanced through management and planning. The article did not substantially address the role of Congress, but eight years after it was published, Congress reasserted its constitutional role in the budget process. Its record of performance since then has ranged from mixed to dysfunctional. The Congress has been criticized for budgetary delays, micromanagement, myopia, procrastination, indiscipline, and an inability to prioritize intelligently. If these faults are set in stone, then an integrated system of budgeting, as described in “The Road to PPB” and related work, is unattainable. On the other hand, if reform of Congressional budgeting is politically feasible, improvements to that system can utilize the unique contributions that a legislature can make to a good system of budgeting.

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The Dysfunctional Congress

Cited by 95 publications

References 39 publications

Temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance: An empirical study

Temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance: An empirical study

Political Rhetoric Through the Lens of Non-Parametric Statistics: are Our Legislators that Different?

Is the U.S. Congress an Insurmountable Obstacle to Any “Far‐Sighted Conception of Budgeting”?

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