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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- 1. The Trouble with Congress -- The Golden Age: Congressional Government in the Nineteenth Century -- The Revolution of 1910 and the Committee Seniority System -- Congressional Resurgence: 1973-80 -- Disgrace, Scandal, and the Rise of Newt Gingrich: 1987-94 -- Congress at Nadir: Legislatures and Modern Politics -- 2. The 1994 Election, the Contract, and the Freshmen -- Democratic Meltdown under President Clinton -- The Gingrich Factor -- The Contract with America

Nicol Rae's engaging account of the Republican revolutionaries' freshman term in Congress shows how would-be radicals became conservative reformers. He persuasively demonstrates that the precepts set forth by Madison in Federalist 10 and 51 are still in force in the American political system.

Among advanced democracies, the United States has traditionally been unique owing to the absence of ideological mass political parties. American parties' scholars have nevertheless traditionally viewed stronger and more ideologically distinct national parties as essential to improve the quality of the American democratic process, a view reflected in the 1950 APSA report, Toward a More Responsible Party System. In the following decades the American parties appeared to weaken still further in all aspects, but this apparent party decline in fact signified a transition to a contemporary American party system with more polarized parties similar to those envisaged by the 1950 report. It remains doubtful, however, that American democracy has been enhanced by these developments. Ironically, the advent of more ideologically coherent parties has also made party scholars more aware of the potentially unhealthy side effects that may attend such a development in a separated governing system. Adapted from the source document.

The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by "bottom-up" electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.