History of Congress
Project Directors: David Brady and Mathew McCubbins

Democracy can be defined as "government by the consent of the governed." Elections, therefore, are the means be which the governed determine the winners and losers in public policy. Parties or coalitions that win elections use their majorities to leverage control of legislative assemblies, and therewith, the policy making process. It is thus easy to see how elections drive public policy in majoritarian systems.

In the United States the link between parties and policyand thus between elections and policyis not so easy to see. Parties compete for election, and the chambers of Congress have a clearly partisan hue, but other, nonmajoritarian, organizing principles seem to be at work. Partly this is a consequence of the separation of powers, and partly a result of our system of representative government, in which each of the three major branches in the legislative processthe House, the Senate, and the Presidencyhave separate elections.

Furthermore, members of Congress have, since before the Civil War, chosen a decentralized form of government. Congress at work is Congress in committee. Committees, if often seems, are not only ancillary to the party organizations, but often at odds with it. At various times in our history, we have observed strong leaders, with public policy being drafted in the leader's office or by the majority party caucus. At other times, the focus of policy making has been in committees, and parties played only a coordinating role. What explains these variations? Recent developments in the literature on Congress have provided us with conditions under which policy making leans towards a committee centered versus a partycentered process. But we have only begun to understand the dynamics of congressional organization.

How Congress organizes to do business has important implications both for our understanding of political representation and policy outcomes. We propose first to extend the current work of Aldrich, Brady, Cox and McCubbins, Kiewiet and McCubbins, Rohde, and Shepsle and Weingast to establish a new, dynamic, theory of congressional organization, and second to test the theory historically. We will look at the eras of congressional organization, from the antebellum rise and institutionalization of standing committees, through the centralized party control under `Boss' Cannon around the turn of the century, into the `King Caucus' years and the rise of committee government in the 1930s, through the reemergence of party government in the early 1970s.

This research will advance our understanding of how the most important legislature in the world operates, and will further improve the state of knowledge about the political development of Congress, national political parties, elections, and public policy making.

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