Issue Politics in Congress [Paperback]

This book explores how legislators respond to their electoral challengers' critiques.This book explores how legislators respond the their electoral challengers' critiques. The conventional wisdom is that winners ignore their challengers, but Sulkin shows that their campaigns have a lasting legacy in the content of legislators' behavior in office. In an effort to shore up their weaknesses before the next election, winning legislators take up the issues prioritzed by these challengers in their campaigns and incorporate them into their agendas, introducing, cosponsoring, and speaking on the floor about legislation dealing with these themes.This book explores how legislators respond the their electoral challengers' critiques. The conventional wisdom is that winners ignore their challengers, but Sulkin shows that their campaigns have a lasting legacy in the content of legislators' behavior in office. In an effort to shore up their weaknesses before the next election, winning legislators take up the issues prioritzed by these challengers in their campaigns and incorporate them into their agendas, introducing, cosponsoring, and speaking on the floor about legislation dealing with these themes.Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? This study, exploring how legislators' experiences as candidates shape their subsequent behavior as policymakers, demonstrates that winning legislators regularly take up their challengers' priority issues from the last campaign and act on them. This attentiveness to their challengers' issues reflects a widespread and systematic yet largely unrecognized mode of responsiveness in the U.S. Congress. Tracy Sulkin reveals the important benefits for these legislators as well as the health and legitimacy of the representative process.1. Electoral challenges and legislative responsiveness; 2. A theory of issue uptake; 3. The nature of campaign and legislative agendas; 4. Assessing uptake; 5. Who respondl$