Despite the early prospects for bipartisan unity on terrorism initiatives, government gridlock continues on most major issues in the wake of the 2004 elections. In this fully revised edition, political scientists David W. Brady and Craig Volden demonstrate that gridlock is not a product of divided government, party politics, or any of the usual scapegoats. It is, instead, an instrumental part of American government?built into our institutions and sustained by leaders acting rationally not only to achieve set goals but to thwart foolish inadvertencies. Looking at key legislative issues from the divided government under Reagan, through Clinton's Democratic government to complete unified Republican control under George W. Bush, the authors clearly and carefully analyze important crux points in lawmaking: the swing votes, the veto, the filibuster, and the rise of tough budget politics. They show that when it comes to government gridlock, it doesn't matter who's in the White House or who's in control of Congress; it's as American as apple pie, and its results may ultimately be as sweet in ensuring stability and democracy.

This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Congress, the successes or failures of women and African Americans in Congress, policy gridlock, and the specific strategies that lawmakers employ to advance their agendas.

Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, we examine how policies spread across the American states. We argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another. The three ingredients for this positive outcome are observable experiments, time to learn, and favorable incentives and expertise among policymakers. Although these ingredients are sometimes plentiful, we also note causes for concern, such as when policies are complex or incompatible with current practices, when policymakers give in to underlying political biases, or when political institutions lack the capacity for cultivating expertise. Under such conditions, states may rely on competition, imitation, and coercion, rather than learning, which can allow bad policies, rather than good ones, to spread. We conclude with lessons for reformers and policymakers and an assessment of our overall argument based on state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Empirical analysis has lagged behind theoretical advancement in the study of legislative delegation of power to bureaucracies. This paper analyzes why state legislatures delegated advisory and policy-forming powers to bureaucracies for the AFDC program from 1935 through 1996. The analysis supports various theories of bureaucratic discretion, while painting a complex political picture of delegation decisions. Legislators rely on bureaucrats to resolve uncertainty, especially when internal legislative information is scarce. Contrary to recent wisdom, however, delegation is not found to be associated with the general condition of unified government. Rather, delegation occurs under both divided and unified government, but the procedures chosen and appointment powers granted vary under these two conditions.

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand the role of political ideology in policymakers' willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments, embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials, expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, and offer an opportunity to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co-partisans in other communities. We also find, however, a similar partisan-based bias among traditional ideological supporters. Thus partisanship does not solely broaden patterns of learning and diffusion, but can also undermine such learning precisely where it is most likely to occur absent any partisan cue. We finish with a discussion on the vast array of new opportunities that an experimental approach offers scholars of policy diffusion.

Studies of the diffusion of policies and institutions tend to focus on innovations that successfully spread across governments. Implicit in such diffusion is the abandonment of the previous policy or institution. This paper focuses directly on the abandonment of welfare policies under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program across the fifty U.S. states from 1997 through 2002. Using a dyad-based event history analysis, I find that, if both states in a pairing have a policy and one state's policy fails (in employing welfare recipients, reducing rolls, or reducing poverty), then the other state is much more likely to abandon that failing policy. Moreover, such learning from the other state's experience is more common when the states are ideologically similar to one another and when the legislature in the potentially learning state is more professional.

Health policymaking in Congress is mired in political gridlock. Reforms are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and the path forward is unclear. To reach such conclusions, scholars of health politics tend to analyze major reform proposals one by one to determine why they succeeded or failed and what lessons could be drawn for the future. Taking a different approach, we examine all health policies proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1973 and 2002. We analyze these bills' fates and the effectiveness of their sponsors in guiding their proposals through Congress. Set against a baseline of policy advancements in other policy areas, we demonstrate that health policymaking is indeed far more gridlocked than policymaking in most other areas. We then isolate some of the causes of this gridlock, as well as the more promising paths forward to health policy reform.

Why may government regulation be a useful complement to business self-regulation in the financial services industry, while largely unneeded or even detrimental for e-commerce? We develop a game-theoretic model wherein a government establishes a mandate for product quality without possessing effective enforcement abilities, and a firm chooses whether to ignore, comply with, or exceed the government quality standard. After bringing a product to market, the firm faces the possibility of political or interest group reactions, such as being the focus of a lawsuit or activist campaign. Equilibrium results show how the threat of lawsuits or interest group activism can complement governmental regulations to discipline the choices of businesses. The model establishes conditions under which certain types of firms in certain environments react favorably or unfavorably to government regulations.