The 2014 midterm congressional elections provided a view of the attitude of American voters in the sixth year of Barack Obama’s presidency. This book provides insight about the formative aspects of the 2014 campaign season as well as in depth coverage of key races for Congress. The first section has four chapters that cover the substance of topics that impacted this campaign cycle: the popularity and productivity of the 113th Congress, voter suppression laws passed in many states, the role of Super PACs and independent expenditures in the campaigns, and the use of social media by members of Congress running for reelection. Case studies follow the path of ten House and seven Senate races from inception to election postmortem. The chapters are narrative and provide analysis of an array of interesting and diverse contests from throughout the country. The authors provide succinct and highly readable chapters meant to illustrate the distinctive nature of the campaigns they are examining. Individual campaigns and elections are shown “up close” and be ready to compare and contrast because of the common format employed throughout the book. Taken together, the chapters reveal that the roads to Congress, while similar in so many ways, each follow a unique route to Capitol Hill.

This book analyzes both local and national House and Senate campaigns in the 2016 election to reveal how distinctive campaign dynamics have a collective national impact. Featuring detailed case studies of ten competitive House races and twelve high-profile U.S. Senate campaigns, the volume provides a deep analysis of campaign dynamics and the polarizing effects of the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. These studies are contextualized by four thematic chapters that cover the most salient talking points of the 2016 elections, including voter registration laws and congressional candidates' use of Twitter. As penetrating as it is comprehensive, this volume provides readers with a fuller understanding of the divided landscape of contemporary American political campaigns.

The Road to War examines how presidential commitments can lead to the use of American military force, and to war. Marvin Kalb notes that since World War II, "presidents have relied more on commitments, public and private, than they have on declarations of war, even though the U.S. Constitution declares rather unambiguously that Congress has the responsibility to "declare" war.

This book explores why some members of Congress are more effective than others at navigating the legislative process and what this means for how Congress is organized and what policies it produces. Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman develop a new metric of individual legislator effectiveness (the Legislative Effectiveness Score) that will be of interest to scholars, voters, and politicians alike. They use these scores to study party influence in Congress, the successes or failures of women and African Americans in Congress, policy gridlock, and the specific strategies that lawmakers employ to advance their agendas.

A compendium of the most ridiculous examples of Congress's pork-barrel spending.

In Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Carlton Reid reveals the pivotal—and largely unrecognized—role that bicyclists played in the development of modern roadways. Reid introduces readers to cycling personalities, such as Henry Ford, and the cycling advocacy groups that influenced early road improvements, literally paving the way for the motor car. When the bicycle morphed from the vehicle of rich transport progressives in the 1890s to the “poor man’s transport” in the 1920s, some cyclists became ardent motorists and were all too happy to forget their cycling roots. But, Reid explains, many motor pioneers continued cycling, celebrating the shared links between transport modes that are now seen as worlds apart. In this engaging and meticulously researched book, Carlton Reid encourages us all to celebrate those links once again.