"Lipinski's impressive analysis of members' communications with constituents yields major insights about partisanship, effects on reelection prospects, and constituent evaluations." --Bruce Oppenheimer, Vanderbilt University "The communication between representatives and their constituents is where election strategy and policy explanations are merged and, until now, we have had only anecdotal evidence. Lipinski's book sheds light on this important part of American political life." --David Brady, Stanford University Congressional Communication challenges the notion that legislators "run against Congress" by routinely denigrating the institution. Using a unique, systematic analysis of the communication from members of Congress to their constituents over a five-year period, Daniel Lipinski challenges this notion, demonstrating key partisan differences in representatives' portrayals of congressional activities. While members of the majority party tend to report that the institution-and, hence, their party-is performing well, members of the minority party are more likely to accuse Congress of doing a poor job. The findings in Congressional Communication offer the first strong empirical evidence from the electoral arena in support of controversial party government theories. Moving beyond previous studies that look only at legislators' messages, Lipinski's research also reveals the effects of these politically strategic claims on voters, whose interpretations don't necessarily bear out the legislators' intended effects. Daniel Lipinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee.

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.

Now in its sixth edition, Political Campaign Communication provides a realistic understanding of the strategic and tactical communication choices candidates and their staffs must make as they wage an election campaign. Trent and Friedenberg's classic text has been updated throughout to reflect recent election campaigns, including 2004 and 2006 as well as the early stages of 2008. A new chapter focuses on the use of the Internet. Political Campaign Communication continues to be a classroom favorite and is thoroughly researched, insightful, and is a reader-friendly text.