Congress (American Politics)

This is a paper concerning gun control policy executed by the 113th U.S Congress as the legal answer for 2011-2012 mass shootings in the United States. The work presents legislative process, but also executive answer for crimes committed in Tucson,AZ; Aurora, CO; and Newtown, CT. It gives an answer to those questioning effectiveness of gun control policy in the US, and provides the reader with conceptions for why the pressure groups and impact of constituency on individual congressman are the key factors in developing a public interest during the process of adopting the law. The essay shows not only a description of the lawmaking process by the 113th Congress, therefore it also provides a subjective approach to the subject and gives a reader a chance to extend an individual assessment in that case.

This study explores depictions of Islam in Senate rhetoric across the 106 th (1999–2000) and 111 th (2009–2010) Congresses. These two periods are compared to consider overall patterns in congressional discourse on Islam and to explore how the September 11 th , 2001 attacks might have shaped this discourse. The study also examines the possible effects of ideology, partisanship, and senator religious affiliation on representations of Islam. The article ultimately suggests that despite some important post-September 11 shifts in Senate rhetoric pertaining to Islam, persistent themes regarding securitization, Orientalist tendencies, moderate-fundamentalist dichotomizations, and ideological divisions merit scrutiny. This study contributes to work on Congress, religion, and American politics by assessing trends in the discursive representation of Islam by United States legislators. Theoretically, the article draws upon the Copenhagen School in International Relations to assess the securitization of Islam within legislative debates and to develop the related concept of normalization.

Three-quarters (75%) of Americans believe trust in the federal government has been shrinking, and 68% say it is very important that the U.S. improve that trust, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The pattern of declining trust also applies to the confidence in fellow Americans: Fully 64% of U.S. adults believe trust in each other has declined, and 58% say it is very important to reverse that shift.

The survey finds that majorities believe low trust in the federal government (64%) and in each other (70%) makes it harder to solve the nation’s key problems. However, many Americans believe the situation can be turned around: 84% believe the level of confidence Americans have in the federal government can be improved, and 86% think improvement is possible when it comes to the confidence Americans have in each other. The report also includes respondents’ ideas about what has caused declining trust and their suggestions for how to fix it.

BREAKING: Evidenced Corruption and Collusion in Federal and Massachusetts State Courts - Recused/Disqualified Judges, Attorneys for Bank Defendants Wells Fargo/US Bank, Federal/State Prosecutors and the Deafening silence of Massachusetts Legislators, including Governor Charlie Baker (R-MA).... WHY you ask? In part, it's an effort to prevent legal precedent from being set that shows more than 60M illegally securitized mortgages in The United States are entirely VOID. Once the Courts initiate corrective action: (1) HARIHAR v US BANK et al (Docket No. 15-cv-11880, US District Court, Boston, MA); and (2) HARIHAR v WELLS FARGO, et al (Docket No. 1981-cv-00050, Middlesex Superior Court, Woburn, MA), stands to become landmark cases in US history - IF Defendants DO NOT wish to accept HARIHAR's GOOD FAITH Opportunity to reach a legal settlement agreement.

Let's see if any of the Defendants' Counsel (K&L Gates LLP, Nelson Mullins LLP, Rich May PC and Harmon Law Offices PC) respond by today's 5pm deadline (Wednesday, 05/13/2020). Either way, this litigation WILL move forward - and the WORLD is watching...

Throughout U.S. history, the two major political parties have switched positions many times on a variety of issues, including how powerful the national government should be and how much it should regulate and guide the American economy. Are these changes simply the product of historical contingency, or are there structural factors at work that can help explain these developments? This paper finds that changes in party control of government can help explain changes in party ideologies with respect to economic policy. Parties in long-term control of unified government tend to change their ideology in ways that call for more economic intervention, while parties in opposition tend to change their ideology in ways that call for less.

This article contributes to the nascent debate about the globally emerging, yet largely undefined, phenomenon of evidence-based judicial review of legislation, by offering a novel conceptualization of evidence-based judicial review.
It argues that evidence-based judicial review can have two related, but very different, meanings: one in which the judicial decision determining constitutionality of legislation is a product of independent judicial evidence-based decision-making; and the other in which the judicial decision on constitutionality of legislation focuses on evidence about the question of whether the legislation was a product of legislative evidence-based decision-making.
The article then employs this novel insight about the overlooked dual meaning of evidence-based judicial review to shed new light on some of the major debates about this phenomenon, such as: whether it should be understood as part of substantive or procedural judicial review; the relationship between evidence-based judicial review and evidence-based lawmaking; and the role of legislative findings in constitutional adjudication.

To what extent are U.S. elected officials polarized on foreign policy? And how do patterns of polarization and bipartisanship differ across policy areas? Using an original data set of nearly 3000 important congressional votes since the end of the Cold War, we find that severe polarization remains the exception rather than the norm in U.S. foreign policy debates and that the U.S. Congress is still less polarized on international than on domestic issues. We also show that foreign policy bipartisanship regularly takes several forms, including bipartisan agreement in support of the president's policies, cross-partisan coalitions, and even bipartisan opposition to the president's policies. Collectively, our findings provide a more nuanced portrait of the politics of U.S. foreign policy than many recent accounts, point to persistent differences in the political alignments associated with different policy areas, and highlight the importance of conceiving of polarization and bipartisanship as more than binary categories.

This groundbreaking book challenges the dominant view of ideology held by both political scientists and political commentators. Rather than viewing ideological constructs like liberalism and conservatism as static concepts with fixed and enduring content, Professor Verlan Lewis explains how the very meanings of liberalism and conservatism frequently change along with the ideologies of the two major parties in American politics. Testing a new theory to help explain why party ideologies evolve the way that they do, this book traces the history of American political parties from the Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans of the 1790s to the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans of today. Ideas of Power shows us how changing party control of government institutions, such as Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, influences how party ideologies develop.

Монография посвящена изучению американского изоляционизма и общественно-политической борьбы по вопросу формирования после-военного внешнеполитического курса США со вступления страны во Вторую мировую войну до 1946 г.
Книга предназначена для специалистов, занимающихся изучени- ем истории XX в. и Второй мировой войны, аспирантов и студентов, а также всех тех, кто интересуется проблемами всемирной истории.

"American Isolationism in the Second World War: Post-War Foreign Policy Formation" is devoted to the study of isolationist in-fluences in American society from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the first post-war congressional election in 1946. The author focuses on various isolationist groups' vision of the U.S. role in the post-war world and their attempts to influence post-war foreign policy forma- tion. American participation in the Second World War was the final stage of the United States' retreat from isolationism. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor suspended one of the most heated debates in American 20th century history – whether or not to enter the war – it did not foreclose a return to isolationism when the war was over.
The defeat of isolationism was not determined by America's en- try into World  War II, but, rather, was the result of a political struggle that continued during the war.  Anti-interventionists looked forward to the first post-war national elections in November 1946 to repeat the success of 1920. President Roosevelt foresaw this danger, and considered the battle against isolationism to be one of his top priorities. Thus, as soon as the United States officially entered the Second World War, the formation of post-war foreign policy became the most important issue of the national political agenda.
The book examines different components of the anti-        in-terventionist forces in the United States after its entry into World War II: isolationists in the U.S. Congress, the isolationist wing of the Re-publican Party, grassroots isolationist organizations, and isolationist press.  It focuses particularly on the moderate isolationists lead by Senator Robert A. Taft, who attempted to reformulate the principles of isolationism to compete successfully with internationalist doctrines in finding new approaches to the role of the United States in the post- war world. Despite these efforts, isolationists suffered a series of con- gressional and national defeats. They suffered their most resounding defeat in the presidential election of 1944, when U.S. voters faced a clear choice between the Democratic Party's platform of international cooperation under Roosevelt's leadership or the revision of foreign policy under Republican leadership.

The passage of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016 evidences a shift in federal legislative support from criminal justice oriented legislative alternatives to more health oriented legislative alternatives to addressing the ongoing Opioid Epidemic. Such a shift was preceded by a redefinition of problem drug use in the policy discourse from an issue of deviancy to a health issue. However, the redefinition of problem drug use as a health issue, has been dominated by policy narratives and causal stories that do not define problem drug use in a manner that aligns with a multi-modal public health oriented legislative solution, a solution type that has been shown to be successful in other developed nations across the world. In order to adopt such an approach in the U.S., pressure groups, including organized interest groups and administrative agencies, will need to utilize narrative techniques to strategically craft a narrative that defines problem drug use as a health issue affected by the social determinants of health. The purpose of this manuscript is to equip legal scholars, researchers, and all concerned citizens with a greater understanding of the legislative problem definition process and the role that pressure groups play in such a process.  Through the utilization of examples from drug policy history, this manuscript demonstrates how pressure groups strategically used problem definitions to shape legislative discourse and pressure Congress into supporting policy solutions that aligned with their problem definitions—attributing addiction to disease at times and to deviancy at other times.  By example, this manuscript outlines strategies that can be used by legal scholars, researchers, and concerned citizens to define problem drug use as a health issue caused by multiple sociological, psychological, economical and biological factors.

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

When the Judiciary Committee initiated its impeachment inquiry of Richard Nixon for his complicity in Watergate, it was the first time that the House of Representatives had commenced such a proceeding against a president since Andrew Johnson in 1868. Johnson’s impeachment and subsequent Senate acquittal was widely regarded as an example of Congress run amok, its partisanship so blatant and its failure so grand that many Americans assumed that presidential impeachment had become obsolete. But impeachment, by its nature, is political, and each Congress defines the bounds of high crimes and misdemeanors in light of the current political climate. For the House in October 1973, Nixon’s Watergate scandal threatened to breach those limits.
From the outset, Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino recognized that if his Committee were to recommend impeaching President Nixon without bipartisan support, the American public would interpret it as another Johnson-like fiasco, and a threat to the constitutional system of government. To thwart suspicion that the Democratic majority would impeach Nixon exclusively for its own political gain, Rodino preached fairness to the President, even as Nixon refused to comply with the Committee’s investigation. Despite Rodino’s assurances, however, his procedural proposals—designed in consultation with the Committee’s Special Counsel, John Doar—did not always seem fair enough to many Republicans. At the same time, many Democrats believed that Rodino and Doar had already accorded Nixon too many rights, which encroached upon the House’s constitutionally guaranteed “sole power of impeachment.”
Ultimately, Rodino conceded that he could not marshal a bipartisan majority without making compromises with members who expected more fairness than he and Doar had initially offered. Despite pressure from their congressional leadership, constituents, and the White House, seven southern Democrats and moderate Republicans formed a “Fragile Coalition” to vote their conscience in favor of three articles of impeachment. In doing so, they convinced a fearful and cynical American public that impeachment could be just, and in the case of Richard Nixon, necessary.

Party support is critical to winning congressional office. However, scholars disagree whether the goals of parties in elections are pragmatic or ideological, and these goals have different implications for the legislative behavior of party-preferred candidates once in office. We join usually distinct perspectives to argue that parties emphasize different goals at different times. We examine links between party support in primary elections and subsequent behaviors of candidates in Congress. We find that candidates who received higher levels of party support during the primary election were more likely to focus their activities in Congress around partisan efforts. Further, party support of incoming legislators is linked to increased partisan behavior through replacement. However, we also find that these relationships are stronger for majority party candidates, suggesting that parties put a greater emphasis on winning majorities when in the minority but a greater emphasis on policy congruence when in the majority.

The Lame Empire: is The Us An Imperial Power? Analysis Of The Foreign Policy Making Structure. The debate over American imperialism has seen an increasing pile of books with titles that combine “America” and “empire”. The paper deeply analyses the structure of US foreign policy in order to understand who is responsible for making foreign policy in the United States. The Constitution does not explain clearly who should lead the decisional process. Thus, cooperation between the two branches is necessary for a strong and effective US foreign policy. That cooperation is complicated when the Congress and Presidency are controlled by different political parties. American history showed us several presidential attempts to give America an imperial shape. The failures of these attempts are the outcome of the imperial ambition colliding with the American institutional and domestic structure. It has proven that the domestic implications on foreign policy turned out to be essential to prevent US from becoming an imperial power. In addition, American does not have the necessary decision-making structures for supporting imperial ambitions."

This article combines the historical record of presidential-congressional relations with previous scholarly findings to develop a model that identifies the members of Congress whose support is critical to the president's ability to build enacting coalitions. It then analyzes the relationship between President Obama and the House of Representatives during the 113th Congress as a case study that demonstrates the model's utility. Conventional wisdom and political pundits suggest that presidents working in divided government will have impossible difficulty working with Congress, but history suggests otherwise. The president's ability to successfully build enacting coalitions during divided government requires him to perform two rather disparate tasks. First, the president must minimize the amount of presidential party members who cross party lines to vote against the president's position. Second, the president must entice at least some opposition party members to cross party lines and support the president's position. Using data from 1981 to 2015, I find that representatives’ behavior on presidential support votes are related to constituency-level presidential strength, electoral vulnerability, ideological moderation, and ideological extremity. I use these results to identify the critical members of the 113th Congress. When a majority of these critical members supported President Obama's positions his legislative efforts were successful. When a majority of these members opposed the president's positions, the House Republican majority defeated the president.

Kökenlerini İngiliz siyasal düzeninden alan impeachment, Amerikan anayasal düzeninde federal kamu görevlilerinin Kongre bünyesinde suçlandırılıp yargılanarak görevden alınmalarını sağlayan siyasi ve anayasal niteliği haiz bir denge ve denetleme mekanizmasıdır. Merkezinde Alexander Hamilton’ın altını çizdiği siyasi suç kavramı olan impeachment, bu yönüyle teknik olarak hukuki ve cezai sorumluluğa yol açmayan yarı-cezai olarak nitelendirebileceğimiz nevi şahsına münhasır bir soruşturma ve yargılama usulüdür. Kurucular’ın çerçevesini belirlediği suçlandırma ibaresi sonucunda impeachment federal görevlilerin etkili bir şekilde soruşturulmasına olanak tanıyan ancak görevden alınmalarına da istisnai cevaz veren bir niteliği haizdir. Suçlandırma yetkisinin tamamen Temsilciler Meclisi’nin inisiyatifinde olması sonucunda impeachment usulünün tetiklenmesi için gerekli olan ağır suç veya kabahatin işlenip işlenmediğinin takdiri de Temsilciler Meclisi’nin elindedir. Bu husus impeachment mekanizmasını siyasi bir niteliğe de büründürmektedir.

The complexities of modern society increase the amount of necessary government actions and decrease the amount of deliberation that goes into them.  The resulting strain on our policymaking system leads government officials to rely on lobbyists and leads lobbyists to fight viciously for influence over government officials.  Symptoms of this problem surface with scandals such as the Abramoff affair and trends such as the recent lobbying boom.  These instances of corruption and inefficiency in congressional practices have renewed interest in lobbying reform.  While lobbyists provide legislatures with benefits such as information and representation of special interests, lobbying often becomes a spending war between conflicting interests that consume the efforts of both legislators and advocacy groups.  Currently, the only limitations over lobbying practices are disclosure laws that require lobbyists to reveal their lobbying activities after spending a certain amount influencing officials.
Mediation may offer an adaptable and widely-beneficial mechanism in congressional lobbying practices.  If Congress had the power to push opposing interest groups to enter mediation after spending a certain amount in lobbying on an issue, they may be able to preclude costly, indirect fighting by reaching consensus over policy action.  Opening and facilitating communication among interests may help to improve legislation and reduce corruption that is associated with interest group pressure.  This process would combine existing, established lobbying practices with two simple legislative mechanisms to decrease malignant lobbyist activity and improve the quality of public policy.  Aside from solving problems, this proposal offers a model for the optimal use of lobbyists in congressional practice and broader implications of increasing the democratic value of government institutions to better fit modern conditions.
Part II of this Note describes the lobbying boom and its negative consequences.  Part III presents the basic idea of interest group mediation as the solution to the inefficiency and corruption involved with current lobbying practices.  Part IV describes existing governmental structures that use mediation in creating consensual public policy such as negotiated rulemaking and public dispute resolution.  Part V explains the mechanisms Congress will need to create in order to implement this process.  Finally, Part VI draws broader implications on optimal lobbying practices and on using interest group mediation to improve the democratic value of legislative enactments.

This essay argues that current regulatory roles of administrative agencies, Congress, and courts are not fully consistent with separation of powers principles. Regulatory agencies often hold all three governmental functions, including judicial-like punitive sanctioning powers and comprehensive legislative powers for setting major regulations, with almost no supervision by other branches of government. Courts tend to grant de facto immunity from judicial review to many regulatory actions of administrative agencies under different types of deference doctrines, while Congress holds merely supervisory veto power over regulations. Executive regulatory functions are also misallocated, as decisions in specific cases with particular applicability are sometimes made by the legislative branch via enactment of laws, rather than by agency action. This essay suggests an innovative theory, both descriptive and normative, of the relationship between regulation and the separation of powers, bringing together constitutional law, administrative law, and regulation scholarship.

Numerous scholars have documented Québec-U.S. ties, but few have studied the “electoral connection” between Québec and the United States or, in other words, the influence of one society on electoral politics in the other society. Studying the 2014 U.S. elections, this article evaluates the impact of Québec on thirteen congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial races that took place in the four states with which Québec shares a land border (New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). Building on various qualitative data (semi-structured interviews with campaign staffs, content analysis of local newspaper and television election coverage, content analysis of televised electoral debates, etc.), this article answers the following question : how did Québec affect voter priorities, interest group mobilization, media election coverage, and candidate strategies in these contests ? Our main conclusion is that the literature on Québec-U.S. relations tends to underestimate the impact of Québec on U.S. public debates. Québec was not a priority – or even an issue – in most races accross the United States in 2014, but it drove crucial electoral discussions in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, where the close ties with Québec influenced what voters, interest groups, the media and electoral candidates defined as key concerns to their districts and states (for instance, oil trains in New York, the Addison Rutland pipeline in Vermont, the Northern Pass in New Hampshire, and border security in Maine).

In one of its earliest debates, the first federal Congress divided over the question of whether the president could remove executive officers. Long neglected by historians, the episode has received ample attention from constitutional scholars who have interpreted it as a crucial contest over the scope of presidential power. However, the debate’s significance owes less to these implications than it does to the language of constitutional essentialism that it produced. In the aftermath of ratification, American politicians were still reckoning with what it meant to be subject to the authority of a supreme, written constitution and in so doing debated not only the meaning of specific constitutional clauses but more generally the kinds of interpretive practices that could legitimately accompany Americans’ governing document. The removal debate began because the Constitution, other than specifications for impeachment, was silent on removal. Some contended that, given this silence, nobody could remove. Most disagreed and as justification contended that Congress enjoyed discretion to fill the document’s silences. However, those who favored removal divided over who could remove: the president alone or in conjunction with the Senate. In waging this disagreement the two sides grounded their rival interpretations in two separate sources of authority: the ‘‘nature of things’’ and the original intent of the Constitution’s framers. In retreating from arguments built on congressional discretion in favor of ones premised on fixed constitutional meaning, politicians constructed a powerful language of constitutional essentialism that implied that the Constitution was equipped with unchangeable meaning.

"Until recently, the dominant line of presidential research asserted that by going public, presidents have the ability to influence voters (Kernell 2007) and that this ability translates into a change in behavior of members of Congress (Krehbiel 1998, Barrett 2004, Canes-Wrone 2001, Eshbaugh-Soha 2006). However, in his paradigm-shifting work, George Edwards (2003, 2009) casts serious doubt on the efficacy of going public. The lack of support in a series of most-likely cases changed the way that scholars think about the presidency, changing the focus of recent literature from national addresses to the importance of “going local” (Cohen 2009; Eshbaugh-Soha 2008, Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2008).

We argue the lack of evidence supporting going public comes from two significant flaws in the literature, one theoretical and one methodological, that lead to inappropriate empirical tests. We address these flaws through an examination of presidential vetoes where members of Congress vote on the initial passage of a bill and, in the case of an override motion, are required to vote a second time on the identical bill. In the intervening time period the president chooses to either give a speech in an attempt to change the behavior of members of Congress or to remain silent. . By examining a unique dataset comparing congressional voting behavior on vetoed legislation and their paired override votes from Presidents Nixon through Clinton , we find support for the idea that speech-making can be persuasive."

Cette thèse porte sur l’évolution du libéralisme au Sénat des États-Unis au cours d’une période de 50 ans (1969-2018). Nous montrons comment la convergence des contextes (politique, social, économique et international) et de l’environnement institutionnel, combinée à des reculs électoraux pour les libéraux et à des changements de garde au sein de la coalition libérale au Sénat, a entraîné l’émergence de « conjonctures critiques », soit des phases au cours desquelles des courants marginaux au sein de la coalition libérale se sont imposés face à un courant dominant. Lors de la première conjoncture critique, entre 1969 et 1978, la fin du consensus de la Guerre froide et l’éclatement de la coalition du New Deal permettent au courant révisionniste, fondé sur la remise en question de certains principes de la politique intérieure et extérieure des États-Unis, d’acquérir une plus grande influence. Lors de la deuxième conjoncture critique, entre 1985 et 1994, on assiste à l’essor d’un libéralisme plus modéré, davantage en phase avec une ère plus conservatrice. Une troisième conjoncture critique, entre 2007 et 2014, voit des libéraux de toutes les allégeances unir leur force autour de la figure de Barack Obama. Nous analysons l’activisme libéral au Sénat entre 1969 et 2018 à l’aide d’un corpus composé à la fois de sources primaires (documents officiels du Sénat, articles de journaux, mémoires de sénateurs, etc.) et de sources secondaires. Nous nous concentrons sur les enjeux liés à l’accès aux soins de santé, aux droits civils et aux questions morales, à la protection de l’environnement et à la politique internationale.
Notre thèse propose une histoire contemporaine des États-Unis s’écartant du récit dominant, en plus de proposer des réflexions novatrices autour de la nature de l’idéologie libérale et de développer le concept de conjoncture critique que nous plaçons au coeur du processus d’évolution du libéralisme. Elle se veut également une contribution originale en American Political Development (APD), un courant de la science politique s’intéressant à la construction historique du politique aux États-Unis. En mobilisant les approches propres à ce sous-champ, nous montrons comment, d’une part, l’activisme des sénateurs libéraux est influencé à la fois par des décisions et des orientations prises par le passé et par des événements contingents qui viennent chambouler l’ordre du jour politique. D’autre part, faisant le pont entre les écoles institutionnaliste et culturaliste de l’APD, nous montrons comment les sénateurs libéraux sont des acteurs qui peuvent contribuer à transformer les contours de l’idéologie libérale.

The study of agenda control in Congress has largely been the study of negative agenda control, but this is only a piece of the full picture of agenda control. I present an approach to analyze agenda control based on estimates of how members would have voted on bills that were killed before the oor (pre-oor bills). This allows me to investigate both positive and negative agenda control, and for a direct comparison between House and Senate. Contrary to recent research comparing the level of agenda control between the two chambers, but consistent with our institutional understanding , I nd higher levels of agenda control in the House than in the Senate. While I nd strong negative agenda control in both chambers, I nd strong positive agenda control in the House only.

This dissertation advances the state of knowledge on interest group influence in congressional committees. Portions of this work have been delivered at the American Political Science Association Annual Meetings. In 2015, this dissertation received the Joseph L. Fisher Award for best dissertation in public policy.

Empirical models of spatial voting allow us to infer legislators' locations in an abstract policy or ideological space using their roll-call votes. Over the past 25 years, these models have provided new insights about the U.S. Congress, and legislative behavior more generally. There are now a number of alternative models, estimators, and software packages that researchers can use to recover latent issue or ideological spaces from voting data. These different tools usually produce substantively similar estimates, but important differences also arise. We investigated the sources of observed differences between two leading methods, NOMINATE and IDEAL. Using data from the 1994 to 1997 Supreme Court and the 109th Senate, we determined that while some observed differences in the estimates produced by each model stem from fundamental differences in the models' underlying behavioral assumptions, others arise from arbitrary differences in implementation. Our Monte Carlo experiments revealed that neither model has a clear advantage over the other in the recovery of legislator locations or roll-call midpoints in either large or small legislatures.

This article explores how Speakers of the House act as foreign policy entrepreneurs. I examine the conditions under which speakers may successfully achieve their foreign policy goals using Henry Clay, Thomas Reed, and Jim Wright as “most likely” case studies. I posit that speakers may act with considerable agency and entrepreneurship in foreign policy, but only succeed under conditions of divided government, when they have significant support from their membership, and when the policy is conducive to legislative action. Even then, speakers may need to use authority outside their formal powers to be successful.

Given the US president's leading role in many areas of American foreign policy, one might expect the president to prevail in executive-legislative clashes over economic sanctions. In this paper, I show that, with surprising frequency, US legislators overcome presidential opposition to their sanctions proposals and induce the president to take foreign policy actions that he or she would not otherwise take. My argument explains why the president often signs and implements sanctions legislation despite considering it inadvisable, as well as how sanctions legislation can influence foreign policy actions, the behavior of foreign governments, or international diplomacy in other ways. I support the argument with descriptive statistics based on an original data set of over a hundred legislative sanctions proposals and a case study of the effects of legislative initiatives targeting Iran over a period of two decades. The paper's findings show that legislative activity is more important than some previous research on sanctions and US foreign policy suggests.

Why do states respond to terrorism in the particular ways they do? The problematic of understanding the causes of the modalities taken by counterterrorism policies is central but seldom addressed by the rare counterterrorism studies. For the Realist school of thought, the differences among state responses depend on the origin of the risk and the capabilities of the state. For decision-making theorists, decision-makers are forced by a strong demand for security from the public opinion to adopt costly measures of dubious effectiveness. However, states having risks of different origin and different capabilities may have similar policies (like France and the United States) and the reverse is true too (like France and the United Kingdom). Similarly, studies on the opinion toward terrorism suggest a partial disconnection between supply and demand of security.

This dissertation postulate an influence of norms and institutions in the making of counterterrorism et asks the general question : what has been the impact of strategic culture on the making of American counterterrorist laws since 9/11 ? Since this date, constantly strengthening bills have been adopted (Patriot act in 2001and its reauthorizations), stopped one time by a partially relaxing bill (Freedom act in 2015).

This dissertation has a qualitative, explicative and rationalist scientific ambition. It aims at establishing causal inferences in order to explain the constant strengthening then the partial relaxing of counterterrorism legislation regarding civil liberties.

Theoretically, this dissertation is grounded in historical institutionalism. It shows the existence of two conflicting strategic cultures in the congressional debates on counterterrorism bills. The hypothesis explaining the resolution of this conflict is : the strategic culture of the American legislator encourages, in case it detects a security breach, the passage of a strengthening bill and, in case it detects a major legitimacy breach, the passage of a moderately relaxing bill.

The process-tracing methodology leads to the construction of a causal mechanism tracing the manifestations of this hypothesis. The mechanism is identical for the two strategic cultures. From the identification by the members of Congress of a security / legitimacy breach, we observe : (1) the strengthening / relaxing supporters produce an injunction to action ; (2) lacking quantification and data about the discussed measures, the members of Congress move the debate on the paralogic domain (invocation of identity markers, « common sense », etc.) ; and (3) they promote a principle of coercion / accountability. Then strengthening / relaxing ensues.

The method used is a manual content analysis, done with the Nvivo software, of the debates for three bills (Patriot act, Patriot sunsets extension act and Freedom act), roughly 219,000 words or 377 pages.

The dissertation shows the structuring role played by triggers (security / legitimacy breaches), which give the members of Congress a pretext to act (security / liberty), which translate into the promotion of a principle of action (coercion / accountability), action that fulfils a double function of political action : control and legitimation. Thus, the evolution of legislation cannot be desribed as a bottom-up process (irrational pressure of the public opinion on decision-makers) but as a top-down process : the members of Congress are the origin of the legislative change, which is partially matching the opinion’s leading attitudes. In this parcimonious and sufficient model offered, the main motive leading the legislator is the irreversible extension of a simulation of legitimate control by the application of powers of exception.

The scientific contribution of this dissertation is double. Empirically, it offers a (1) systematic analysis (2) of a vast overlooked corpus. Theoretically, it shows counterterrorism policy (1) is partially disconnected from security demand and security furthering but that it (2) matches the government’s desire to extend the means of its control on an environment perceived as more and more dangerous, a policy schematized as a hysteresis with a ratchet effect.


Keywords : terrorism, counterterrorism, security, legitimacy, historical institutionalism, strategic culture, process-tracing.

Candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives face a strategic decision regarding how closely to align themselves with their primary constituency during their biennial elections. Specifically, should they focus on aligning themselves with their primary voters, or focus on the broader electorate, even when such a focus goes against the demonstrated desires of their primary base? Undoubtedly, other factors – such as personal characteristics and ideology – affect this decision. But how much? And what consequences do their primary election choices have for the general election?

Existing findings are mixed. Some papers support the notion that congresspeople tend to focus on the broader general electorate when positioning in primaries, as opposed to the primary base. Others seem to show a consistent focus by congresspeople on their party base, even during the general election. These findings are further clouded by questions of how district competitiveness affects candidate strategy. Donald Trump’s campaign for the 2016 presidential election offers a unique opportunity to address these questions. During the general election, many Republican House candidates either openly rejected their party’s presidential candidate, or refused to endorse him. The remaining politicians offered conditional, or unconditional support.

I collected original data on Republican House candidates’ support for Trump to test two hypotheses. First, Republican House candidates should be more likely to support Trump in the general election in districts where Trump received a high vote share in the primary—regardless of their individual and district characteristics. Second, for the congressperson’s general election, in moderate districts there should be a vote share penalty for House representatives that supported Trump, but a positive effect in more extreme districts.

What is the constitutional textual basis for key statutes that constrain the national security apparatus and condition the President’s ability to direct it – statutes that are neither spending limitations, nor war declarations or authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs), nor militia laws?  There are a series of such statutory frameworks, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Posse Comitatus Act and its relatives (particularly parts of the Insurrection Act), Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the covert action statute, anti-torture laws, and the War Powers Resolution.  The best or at least strong additional textual footing for these statutes, this article argues, is Article I, Section 8, Clause 14 of the Constitution.  This clause gives Congress the power “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.”  Although the common assumption is that this Land and Naval Forces Clause is a single enumerated power, this article theorizes the Clause as providing Congress two powers: a well-recognized Internal Regulation power over military justice and other internal affairs of the national security apparatus, and also an External Government power over operations.  This article analyzes the Clause’s text, counter-authoritarian origins, and its constitutional interpretation since the Founding Era.  This article argues for the Clause’s constitutional rediscovery and embrace as primary textual footing for a series of vital statutory frameworks that govern the military and the Intelligence Community at the intersection of liberty and security.  These include the Posse Comitatus Act, the Insurrection Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Covert Action statute, torture statute, War Powers Resolution, Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), annual National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs), and the emerging statutory framework regarding cyber operations.  Ultimately, the Clause’s power is contingent: Congress must use it and other legal actors must give life to its statutes and constitutional values for it to be meaningful.