The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era

Join the John W. Kluge Center for an virtual author salon with Frances E. Lee and James M. Curry, who, with Kluge Center Director John Haskell, will discuss their 2020 book: The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era.

Lee and Curry will cover some of their most surprising findings, including the idea that Congress is less dysfunctional than typically thought, and that the passage bipartisan legislation is still commonplace. Tracking legislative proposals, they find that divided government often over performs expectations, while a party holding unified power is often less able to accomplish its goals than expected.

Frances E. Lee is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs where she is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs. She is a recent Library of Congress Chair in Congressional Policymaking at the Kluge Center. Lee is author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (2016) and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (2009). Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and other outlets.

James M. Curry is an associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah, and co-director of the Utah Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network. Curry's research focuses on U.S. politics and policymaking, especially the U.S. Congress. Specifically, he analyzes how contemporary legislative processes and institutions affect legislative politics, with a particular focus on the role of parties and leaders in the U.S. Congress. His book, Legislating in the Dark (2015), examines how congressional leaders leverage their unique access to legislative information and resources to encourage their rank-and-file to support leadership decisions, and how rank-and-file members of Congress are often in the dark as the legislative process unfolds. Legislating in the Dark was selected as the recipient of the 2016 Alan Rosenthal Prize.