America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison Through Newt Gingrich

"David Mayhew is one of the great political scientists in America; he teaches at Yale and he’s written a number of very important books on Congress. America’s Congress is always one of my favorites. Mayhew believes that Congress has had a much more active and influential history than is commonly believed. Accessible for lay people and experts alike, the book does a really nice job of creating categories of the different types of “actions” that members of Congress have done since the start of the country. He captured some of Congress’s great characters like Robert Wagner, a member of Congress during the 1930s. Mayhew methodically shows that many of the ideas that become the New Deal came from Wagner, rather than from President Roosevelt; he astutely notes that Roosevelt could be seen as the person who signed Senator Wagner’s bills. Most important, he shows that there are very different ways to be a “member” of Congress, and over the course of history, legislators have taken a large variety of approaches to employing congressional power. Congress: The Electoral Connection engrained a fundamental fact about Congress: A lot of what members do is react to what’s going on in their districts to make sure that they’re going to be reelected. It’s a fundamental fact, but one we have to remember as we try to figure out why different members are doing what they do on our big issues. Using rational choice, Mayhew opened up the basic dynamic that guided legislative behavior (though he has greatly broadened his scope over time). Divided We Govern is also a fantastic book; it went against the conventional wisdom that when you have divided government, when Congress is controlled by one party and the presidency is held by the other party, you get gridlock. Mayhew shows that, historically, that’s not true. It is classic Mayhew: take something we all think to be true and shatter the myth. In periods of divided government, like the early 1970s, for example, a lot of important legislation often comes out of the institution. Mayhew also wrote a terrific book on party realignment . Conventional wisdom held that when elections brought to power new coalitions the politics and policies of Congress changed; the classic example cited was the election of 1932. He showed this theory was overblown. In most of his books, he takes on conventional wisdom and undercuts what we thought we knew about Congress. His most basic contribution was to show that while we think of Congress as a dysfunctional, do-nothing institution, it’s actually just the opposite."