Congressional politics 147but neither does it produce a stable, continuously coordinated government,
which is usually represented as the great boon of the Anglo-Saxon system
of single-member, simple-majority electoral systems. The tendency towards
multi-party politics that we found earlier is barely restrained by the needs
of organising Congress and by the advantages of maintaining control of cer-
tain key congressional positions. Thus policy-making is haphazard and dis-
continuous. Congress approves programmes and then refuses to appropriate
money for them; it demands economy and then spends more money than
ever on projects that will benefit constituents. The nature of Congress and
the working of the legislative process raise the whole question of ensuring
governmental responsibility for policy: how can the citizen affix responsibil-
ity for governmental policies, or the lack of them, if faced with a continually
changing kaleidoscope of coalitions in Congress? And yet in a very real sense
there is more genuinely responsible government in Congress than in most of
the party-dominated legislatures of the world. For we have seen that there is
nothing that ultimately is of more importance to members of Congress than
the views of a majority of their constituents. However, the pluralist nature of
Congress makes it unlikely that it will be able to provide the kind of leader-
ship that is necessary in the modern state. That leadership can only come, if
it is to come at all, from the president.
Further reading
Foley, M. and Owens, J.E. (1996) Congress and the Presidency: Institutional Politics in a
Separated System, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Loomis, B. (2000) The Contemporary Congress, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Mayhew, D. (2000) America’s Congress, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schickler, E. (2001) Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the
U.S. Congress, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Websites
Congress: http://www.congresslink.org
Library of Congress: http://www.thomas.loc.gov
US Senate: http://www.senate.gov
US House of Representatives: http://www.house.gov