On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000

Extract

On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000. By Julian E. Zelizer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 376p. $30.00.

Julian Zelizer's book joins a number of others that have been taking up the issue of congressional reform. Recent books by political scientists E. Scott Adler (Why Congressional Reforms Fail, 2002), Nelson Polsby (How Congress Evolves, 2003), and Eric Schickler (Disjointed Pluralism, 2001) are among a growing list that seeks to explain the success or failure of congressional reforms during the twentieth century. One of the interesting aspects of these books is that they are authored by mostly younger scholars who are reassessing, and sometimes seriously challenging, a genre of scholarship that was pioneered during the seventies by such scholars as Lawrence Dodd, Bruce Oppenheimer, Barbara Sinclair, and James Thurber, to name a few, many of whom were American Political Science Association Congressional Fellows working in Congress during the period of substantial congressional reform in the 1970s.