Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Going public has long been a tool of the president, but over the last several decades, members of Congress have increasingly employed it for their own purposes. Using content analysis of national news sources to study how congressional members responded to three specific presidential calls to reform Social Security (1977, 1981, and 2005) and additional content analysis of the New York Times for select periods from 1977-2001, this paper attempts to understand more about how members of Congress go public to respond to the president and how increasing polarization in Congress has affected this. We find evidence that going public in Congress has increased at least on issues that are high priorities, that which congressional members go public has changed over time and with the political environment, and that the overall tone of members’ public responses to the president has become more partisan. Our findings suggest implications for the balance of power between Congress and the president and their ability to work together to make policy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The power to nominate and confirm federal judges is shared by the Congress and the President, yet our understanding of this practice is often obscured by a narrow focus on political factors in the president’s purview, on the confirmation or rejection stage (where Congress has negative power, not positive power) or on nominations the Supreme Court (where Congress has little say). However, few works explicitly address the role Congress plays in shaping the pre-selection pool for judicial nominees. In this article, we explore the pre-nomination process by examining judicial nomination requests from Members of Congress to the Eisenhower and Ford Administrations. We find that the characteristics of the nominee matter more than the characteristics of the nominator. Party affiliation of a nominee is the strongest predictive factor, along with nominations to lower courts and experience in the federal government, while senatorial courtesy and prior legislative and judicial experience has no effect. The results provide for a more comprehensive view of the nomination-confirmation process and suggest that characteristics of nominees, Congress and the president must be taken into account in describing judicial confirmation patterns.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the growing unwillingness on the part of Congress to assert constitutional authority to check the president. It asks whether judicial activism has softened the congressional will.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My purpose for this paper is to share an effective student classroom exercise for teaching the legislative process in an introductory American Government class (Introduction to Political Science). The exercise is a mock congress I designed that is held with approximately 25-30 students over a three-hour period. I designed it to meet a number of intended student learning outcomes related to the functions of the U.S. Congress which I teach in an introductory political science course. In this paper I describe how I conduct and implement the mock congress with students. Furthermore, I introduce my initial findings regarding the exercise’s effectiveness as evident from some qualitative student statements and some basic grade statistics. The central purpose of the paper is to share the dynamic nature of the exercise and some initial existing evidence of its effectiveness. In the future, I plan to gather and analyze more statistics to assess the ongoing effectiveness of the mock congress activity.

Supporting Publications:
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Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Much of the literature on majority-minority districts has revolved around the electoral power and substantive representation of Blacks. However as American demographics have become more diverse, so has the racial makeup of majority-minority districts. Unfortunately, the literature has done little to account for the fact that both Blacks and Hispanics are now concentrated in majority-minority districts, and the two groups have occasionally been forced to compete for such districts in the redistricting or electoral process. We seek to correct the omission of Hispanics from the majority-minority district equation and estimate how to maximize electoral power and substantive representation for both groups. Given the changing demographics of America, it is no longer adequate to discuss majority-minority districts or Black electoral power and substantive representation only in the context of a Black-white political binary.
Using majority-minority districts in the 103rd Congress, we estimate the effects of majority-minority districting on the substantive representation and electoral power of Blacks and of Hispanics. We do find evidence of convergence and divergence on substantive issues within the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses. Furthermore, we find that while sizeable Hispanic populations in districts do not hamper the probabilities of electing Black members of Congress, the probability of electing Hispanic members of Congress does decline with increasing Black population.