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Rationalization is the adjustment of one's beliefs about politically relevant information, the better to fit one's political behavior or one's political attitudes. This reverses the usual causal order, in which it is assumed that people start with values, add what little factual information they have, & produce policy, partisan, or ideological "attitudes" as a result. If people actually work backwards from their political behavior to their attitudes, & from their attitudes to their beliefs about "the facts," there are obvious & troubling implications for democratic legitimacy, as well as for the academic study of democratic competence. I confine myself here to exploring some of the empirical evidence for rationalization, & to thinking about how to solve the resulting research problems, bracketing the normative issues. Figures. Adapted from the source document.

Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the ""filibuster,"" has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate. What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into pa

Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the 'filibuster, ' has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Wawro and Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the 19th and early 20th century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate. What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into parliamentary chaos. They show that institutional patterns of behavior induced by inherited rules did not render Senate rules immune from fundamental changes. The authors' theoretical arguments are supported through a combination of extensive quantitative and case-study analysis, which spans a broad swath of history. They consider how changes in the larger institutional and political context--such as the expansion of the country and the move to direct election of senators--led to changes in the Senate regarding debate rules. They further investigate the impact these changes had on the functioning of the Senate. The book concludes with a discussion relating battles over obstruction in the Senate's past to recent conflicts over judicial nominations.--Book jacket flap.

The recent moves by senators to impose majority cloture for nominations provides a unique opportunity for advancing our understanding of the evolution of the Senate into a supermajoritarian institution. We integrate discussion of alternative theoretical perspectives on Senate development and path dependence to shed new light on mechanisms of stability and change, concluding that the perspective that Senate majorities have generally maintained supermajority procedures because they preferred them to the alternative of majority rule has more explanatory power than does the perspective that Senate majorities were "locked in" to these procedures by previous institutional choices.

Seeking to advance historical studies of political institutions and behavior, we argue for an expansion of the standard methodological toolkit with a set of innovative approaches that privilege parameter heterogeneity to capture nuances missed by more commonly used approaches. We address critiques by prominent historians and historically oriented political scientists who have underscored the shortcomings of mainstream quantitative approaches for studying the past. They are concerned that the statistical models ordinarily employed by political scientists are inadequate for addressing temporality, periodicity, specificity, and context-issues that are central to good historical analysis. The innovations that we advocate are particularly well suited for incorporating these issues in empirical models, which we demonstrate with replications of extant research that focuses on locating structural breaks relating to realignments and split-party Senate delegations and on the temporal evolution in congressional roll-call behavior connected to labor policy during the New Deal and Fair Deal. Adapted from the source document.