Legislatures are arguably the most important political institution in modern democracies. The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, written by some of the most distinguished legislative scholars in political science, provides a comprehensive and up-to-date description and critical assessment of the state of the art in this key area.

The Handbook of Legislative Research, a comprehensive summary of the results of research on nineteenth and twentieth-century legislatures, is itself a landmark in the evolution of legislative studies. Gathered here are surveys by leading scholars in the field, each providing inventory of an important subfield, an extensive bibliography, and a systematic assessment of what has been accomplished and what directions future research must take.

This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades.

No legislature in the world has a greater influence over its nation's public affairs than the US Congress. The Congress's centrality in the US system of government has placed research on Congress at the heart of scholarship on American politics. Generations of American government scholars working in a wide range of methodological traditions have focused their analysis on understanding Congress, both as a lawmaking and a representative institution. The purpose of this volume is to take stock of this impressive and diverse literature, identifying areas of accomplishment and promising directions for future work. The editors have commissioned 37 chapters by leading scholars in the field, each chapter critically engages the scholarship focusing on a particular aspect of congressional politics, including the institution's responsiveness to the American public, its procedures and capacities for policymaking, its internal procedures and development, relationships between the branches of government, and the scholarly methodologies for approaching these topics. The Handbook also includes chapters addressing timely questions, including partisan polarization, congressional war powers, and the supermajoritarian procedures of the contemporary Senate. Beyond simply bringing readers up to speed on the current state of research, the volume offers critical assessments of how each literature has progressed - or failed to progress - in recent decades. The chapters identify the major questions posed by each line of research and assess the degree to which the answers developed in the literature are persuasive. The goal is not simply to tell us where we have been as a field, but to set an agenda for research on Congress for the next decade. The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are a set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of scholarship on American politics. Each volume focuses on a particular aspect of the field. The project is under the General Editorship of George C. Edwards III, and distinguished specialists in their respective fields edit each volume. The Handbooks aim not just to report on the discipline, but also to shape it as scholars critically assess the scholarship on a topic and propose directions in which it needs to move. The series is an indispensable reference for anyone working in American politics. General Editor for The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics: George C. Edwards III

Where is the power? Students of politics have pondered this question and social scientists have scrutinized formal political institutions and the distribution of power among agencies of the government and the state. But we still lack a rich bank of data measuring the power of specific governmental agencies, particularly national legislatures. This book assesses the strength of the national legislature of every country in the world with a population of at least a half-million inhabitants. The Legislative Powers Survey (LPS), is a list of 32 items that gauges the legislature's sway over the executive, its institutional autonomy, its authority in specific areas, and its institutional capacity. Data were generated by means of a vast international survey of experts, extensive study of secondary sources, and painstaking analysis of constitutions and other relevant documents. Individual country chapters provide answers to each of the 32 survey items, supplemented by expert commentary and relevant excerpts from constitutions.

The SAGE Handbook of Political Science presents a major retrospective and prospective overview of the discipline. Comprising three volumes of contributions from expert authors from around the world, the handbook aims to frame, assess and synthesize research in the field, helping to define and identify its current and future developments. It does so from a truly global and cross-area perspective Chapters cover a broad range of aspects, from providing a general introduction to exploring important subfields within the discipline. Each chapter is designed to provide a state-of-the-art and comprehensive overview of the topic by incorporating cross-cutting global, interdisciplinary, and, where this applies, gender perspectives. The Handbook is arranged over seven core thematic sections: Part 1: Political Theory Part 2: Methods Part 3: Political Sociology Part 4: Comparative Politics Part 5: Public Policies and Administration Part 6: International Relations Part 7: Major Challenges for Politics and Political Science in the 21st Century