The several contributors 2011. All rights reserved. The Oxford Handbook of the American Congress, written by leading scholars in the field, takes stock of the impressive and diverse literature published about the American Congress. No legislature in the world has a greater influence over its nation's public affairs than the US Congress. Congress's centrality in the US system of government has placed research on Congress at the heart of scholarship on American politics. Generations of American government scholars working in a wide range of methodological traditions have focused their analysis on understanding Congress, both as a law-making and a representative institution. Each article of this text focuses on a particular aspect of congressional politics, including the institution's responsiveness to the American public, its procedures and capacities for policymaking, its internal procedures and development, relationships between the branches of government, and the scholarly methodologies for approaching these topics. The book also includes articles addressing timely questions, including partisan polarization, congressional war powers, and the supermajoritarian procedures of the contemporary Senate. Beyond simply bringing readers up to speed on the current state of research, the book offers critical assessments of how each literature has progressed-or failed to progress-in recent decades. The articles identify the major questions posed by each line of research and assess the degree to which the answers developed in the literature are persuasive. This is one of The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics-a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics.
