Here, here and here I analyzed why I think the national swing against Republicans is likely to lead to a more than proportional shift in Congress in 2006, looking mainly at how shifts in perceived voter preferences feed back into member decisions to retire and challengers decisions to contest races. I had earlier promised a cite for the underlying logic of these arguments. Re-reading the book for my Congress class on Thursday, I realized that I was getting the basic idea from Cox and McCubbins’s fantastic book, Legislative Leviathan. It’s not an easy book, but it repays close reading.
Author: Steven M. Teles
Steven Teles is a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of American Politics. He is the author of Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas), and co-editor of Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy (Cambridge). He is currently completing a book on the evolution of the conservative legal movement, co-editing a book on conservatism and American Political Development, and beginning a project on integrating political analysis into policy analysis. He has also written journal articles and book chapters on international free market think tanks, normative issues in policy analysis, pensions and affirmative action policy in Britain, US-China policy and federalism. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, Holy Cross, and Hamilton colleges, and been a research fellow at Harvard, Princeton and the University of London.
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