“Megabills” that package scores of legislative proposals into House and Senate bills are a phenomenon of the congressional reforms of the 1970s and the agenda changes of the 1980s. These bills generate unprecedented disagreements between the House and Senate, requiring congressional leaders, the president, committee chairs, and junior members to play new roles in this struggle for resolution.
Conference committees of hundreds of members, informal negotiations among party leaders, and preconference strategizing and behavior are among the new realities of bicameralism that are viewed in this study. These conferences are vital because they generally are the last arenas in which large-scale changes can be made in legislation.
Van Beek uses a case study approach that investigates the legislative histories of recent bills on the savings and loan bailout, the major trade bill of the late 1980s, and several budget reconciliation bills. His research is brought to life through personal experience as a legislative aide, direct observation of Congress at work, and interviews with members, staff and lobbyists.
Around the world, established parties are weakening, and new parties are failing to take root. In many cases, outsiders have risen and filled the void, posing a threat to democracy. Why do most new parties fail? Under what conditions do they survive and become long-term electoral fixtures? Brandon Van Dyck investigates these questions in the context of the contemporary Latin American left. He argues that stable parties are not an outgrowth of democracy. On the contrary, contemporary democracy impedes successful party building. To construct a durable party, elites must invest time and labor, and they must share power with activists. Because today’s elites have access to party substitutes like mass media, they can win votes without making such sacrifices in time, labor, and autonomy. Only under conditions of soft authoritarianism do office-seeking elites have a strong electoral incentive to invest in party building. Van Dyck illustrates this argument through a comparative analysis of four new left parties in Latin America: two that collapsed and two that survived.
WINNER OF THE 2008 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE
Selected by Scott Turow
Feeling distanced from her friends and family, middle-aged divorcée Caitlin Drury is encouraged by her daughter to express her feelings in a diary, but she is hesitant: “I feel lonely she wrote, then crossed it out. She didn't like the idea of someone coming along later to read her journal, finding out she felt lonely." “Like That,” and other stories from Anthony Varallo's new collection Out Loud give voice to the disconnections of family and relationships, and the silent emotions that often speak louder than words.
In “The Walkers,” we follow a couple on their daily trek through a bedroom community, where they partially glimpse their neighbors' lives, longing for inclusion. Yet their insular lifestyle ensures that they deal with people only on the surface--without learning the truth of their problems.
Out Loud tells of longings for meaningful expression and the complexities and escapism of human interactions that keep us from these truths. Varallo uses the trials of youth and remembrances of the past, the rituals and routines of the everyday, the interactions of family, friends, teachers, and neighbors to peel away the layers of language and actions we use to shield ourselves.
It has become a truism that “leadership depends upon the situation,” but few behavioral scientists have attempted to go beyond that statement to examine the specific ways in which leaders should and do vary their behavior with situational demands. Vroom and Yetton select a critical aspect of leadership style-the extent to which the leader encourages the participation of his subordinates in decision-making. They describe a normative model which shows the specific leadership style called for in different classes of situations. The model is expressed in terms of a “decision tree” and requires the leader to analyze the dimensions of the particular problem or decision with which he is confronted in order to determine how much and in what way to share his decision-making power with his subordinates.
Other chapters discuss how leaders behave in different situations. They look at differences in leadership styles, and what situations induce people to display autocratic or participative behavior.
Minnesota’s Twin Cities have long been powerful engines of change. From their origins in the early nineteenth century, the Twin Cities helped drive the dispossession of the region’s Native American peoples, turned their riverfronts into bustling industrial and commercial centers, spread streets and homes outward to the horizon, and reached well beyond their urban confines, setting in motion the environmental transformation of distant hinterlands. As these processes unfolded, residents inscribed their culture into the landscape, complete with all its tensions, disagreements, contradictions, prejudices, and social inequalities. These stories lie at the heart of Nature’s Crossroads. The book features an interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars who aim to open new conversations about the environmental history of the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press