We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The House from Cannon to Rayburn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Cooper and Brady argue that the homogeneity of legislative parties' electoral constituencies varies over time. The more homogeneous the electoral constituency of a party, the more cohesive the legislative party. A cohesive legislative party, in turn, concentrates power in the hands of central leaders and relies more on leaders to direct policymaking. The less homogeneous the electoral constituency and the less cohesive the legislative party, the more power will be dispersed and the more leadership will be oriented toward bargaining and maintaining good relations within the party.
Leadership is an aspect of social life that has been extensively studied in a variety of institutional or organizational settings. Yet, it remains a topic in which our intellectual grasp falls far short of our pragmatic sense of the impacts leaders have on organizational operations and performance.
This is as true, if not more true, of Congress than of other organizations. Here, too, analysts are perplexed by the difficulties of conceptualizing key variables, treating highly transient and idiosyncratic personal factors, and identifying relationships amidst a maze of interactive effects. Moreover, the task is rendered even more complex by the highly politicized character of the Congress as compared with most of the organizational contexts in which leadership has been studied.
This is not to say that knowledge and understanding of congressional leadership have remained static. Nonetheless, our grip on the topic is as yet not firm; we continue to lack a developed sense of what we should be looking at and how to proceed.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
