Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T08:04:05.887Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Legislative Learning: The 104th Republican Freshmen in the House By Timothy J. Barnett. New York: Garland, 1998. 333p. $60.00

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2004

Gregory R. Thorson
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota at Morris

Extract

The 1994 elections were watershed elections in several respects. Perhaps most significantly, the Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1953. In the process, the 1994 elections also swept into office a large, relatively homogeneous group of 73 House Republican freshmen determined to change the political system. With size comes an opportunity for power in Congress, and the 73 Republican freshmen elected in 1994 were determined to exert considerable influence over the legislative process. Not since the 1974 elections produced the 76 freshmen Democrats (i.e., the Watergate Babies) have political scientists focused so much attention on a single class of legislators. Timothy Barnett's Legislative Learning is a nice complement to similar books already written about this interesting group of legislators, including Richard Fenno and Michael Armacost's Learning to Govern: An Institutional View of the 104th Congress (1997) and Nicol Rae's Conservative Reformers: The Republican Freshmen and the Lessons of the 104th Congress (1998).

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2002 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.