Lawmaking and Public Policy
Lawmaking and Public Policy
The American Institutions Project (AIP), founded five years ago as a project of ISERP, combines research with workshops and graduate teaching to advance new initiatives in the study of the political history of the United States.
AIP's primary research venture focuses on Congress and lawmaking. With NSF support, and in collaboration with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, our project on the "Substance of Representation " is probing how the type and content of particular public policies shape political partisanship, the formation of coalitions, and the passage of statutes. It seeks to make four primary contributions: (1) create a large-scale dataset coding roll calls and statutes in American history by a new substantive coding scheme; (2) revive substantively-oriented scholarship by students of Congress; (3) offer tools for making politics a constitutive part of policy studies; and (4) enable political historians to integrate Congress into their analytical narratives.
We have classified roll calls and statutes using three tiers. The first captures basic features of governmental policy found in all modern states and adjudicated by legislatures in all representative democracies: sovereignty, organization and scope, international relations, and domestic affairs. The third, most detailed, tier contains sixty-nine categories including the full range of policies in American history. Between these two levels, a middle tier acts as a buckle connecting the deductive first tier to the inductive third.
Empirical and theoretical work on Congress has advanced more than any other research site in studies of American politics over the past quarter-century. Grounded especially in the purposive behavior of individual legislators and spatial modeling, this burst of research has produced important new knowledge about subjects including the electoral connection, the preferences of members, the role of information, the extent of legislative productivity, mechanisms of delegation, the importance of parties and committees in serving individual members and influencing the policy process, gridlock and divided government, the impact of rules and procedures, and polarization, both ideological and partisan. Yet, unlike some older and neglected work by Aage Clausen, David Mayhew, and David Brady, this research endeavor has been almost completely divorced from the content of legislation despite the fact that Congress is where public policy is made, judged, and revised.
This feature of recent congressional studies has contributed to the absence of a political dimension, especially one with historical depth, in analytical policy studies. Most work by policy scholars targets a particular problem-uneven health coverage, inner city decay, trade imbalances, demographic pressures on social insurance-with solutions proposed on the implicit assumption that good ideas grounded in systematic inquiry and persuasively articulated can directly yield solutions. When considered at all, politics often is viewed as an unwelcome exogenous factor, as a barrier between reason and result.
Without a substantive orientation, it has also been difficult for political historians to focus on Congress. As a result, most political narratives highlight the presidency without attending to lawmaking. This constriction of political history has been reflected within the more qualitative and historical side of political science-the subfield of American Political Development-that has proceeded to examine the character of the liberal state without much attention to political representation.
In short, the project aims to bring substance back to studies of Congress, and Congress back to studies of policy and political history.
For more information about AIP, contact Ira Katznelson.
