The whips: building party coalitions in Congress

In: Legislative politics and policy making

Abstract

"In The Whips, C. Lawrence Evans offers a comprehensive, systematic, and historical exploration of party coalition building and legislative strategy in the U.S. House and Senate, ranging from the relatively bipartisan, committee-dominated chambers of the 1950s to the highly polarized congresses of the 2000s. In addition to examining roll call votes, personal interviews with lawmakers and staff, and other standard techniques of congressional scholarship, Evans utilizes the personal papers of dozens of former members of the House and Senate leadership, especially former whips. These records allow Evans to create and examine a database of nearly 1,500 internal leadership polls about evolving member preferences on hundreds of significant bills across five decades of recent congressional history. The result is a rich and sweeping contribution to scholarly and public understanding of congressional party leaders at work. Since the whips regularly provide leaders and members with valuable political intelligence, examining them is essential to understanding how coalitions are forged and deals are made on the most important legislation considered on Capitol Hill. But their impact--and the impact of other leaders in the lawmaking process--is far more nuanced and interesting than is implied by most other treatments of partisan coalition building in Congress"--