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The field of nonmarket strategy has expanded rapidly over the past 20 years to provide theoretical and practical guidance for managers seeking to influence policymaking. Much of this scholarship has built directly on spatial and “pivotal politics” models of lawmaking. While extremely helpful at identifying crucial targets for lobbying, these models treat all policymakers as identical in their abilities to advance legislative agenda items through various policymaking hurdles. We build upon these earlier models, but include policymakers who vary in their relative effectiveness at advancing measures through the legislative process. We identify how the implications of our model deviate from those of conventional (pivotal politics) analyses. We then present an empirical strategy for identifying effective Lawmakers in the United States Congress, and illustrate the utility of this approach for managers developing nonmarket strategies in legislative institutions, relying on the case of banking and financial services reforms between 2008 and 2011.

This chapter generally concerns how elements of liberal democratic constitutional discourse have functioned to normalize emergency and possible state of exception governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, the chapter focuses on the transference of legislative power to the executive under conditions of emergency rule and how it is possible for delegated emergency lawmaking to operate beyond the limits of what is constitutionally permissible; thus, triggering a state of exception. The chapter uses the deployment emergency rule during the pandemic in The Bahamas as a case study to show how ambivalence and legal uncertainty were the two principal drivers of the normalization process produced by elements of constitutional discourse, and then further explains how constitutionalism, generally, and in its dysfunctional application, can reinforce the processes normalizing emergency and possible state of exception governance.

This essay will consider three theories developed by international law scholars to analyze the international legal terrain and the strengths of each as well as issues it fails to address sufficiently in the dimensions of power, meaning, and social relationships: bottom-up lawmaking; transnational legal processes; and global legal pluralism. The idea of bottom-up lawmaking, already discussed, has the strength of beginning from the everyday practices by which problems are solved that lead eventually to the creation of a body of law. However, the phrase bottom-up suggests that this is a grassroots movement, while it is typically cosmopolitan elites who generate the informal rules that become established over time. Explicit attention to the power relationships underlying this process would help to clarify what “bottom-up” means. As Judith Resnick points out, the terms “soft law” and “hard law” are themselves problematic, incorporating gender ideologies and suggesting that some international laws are enforced firmly, which is rarely the case in practice (personal communication).

Members of Congress become involved in scandals on a regular basis. These range from personal imbroglios, like sexual affairs or substance abuse, to professional scandals like embezzlement of campaign funds, abuse of office, or insider trading. As a common feature of congressional life, scholars have shown that scandals frequently disrupt the electoral and legislative trajectories of representatives' careers.

However, it must be remembered that congressional offices are comprised of more than just an individual member. Congressional offices are legislative enterprises, and a representative's staff are integral to his or her political and lawmaking activities. Accordingly, studying how scandals relate to the careers of congressional staff is an important but overlooked topic.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the relationship between members' malfeasances and the careers of the staff around them. The authors combine a list of congressional scandals with a dataset that captures the turnover of staff in congressional offices. The chapter proceeds in four parts. First, the authors describe the structure of a congressional office and the relationship between members and their staff. Next, the authors provide an overview of scandals in Congress and what previous literature has uncovered about their effects. Third, the authors examine staffing patterns and turnover in offices hit by scandal, uncovering evidence that scandals are associated with staff departures. The authors end by considering how Congress as an institution could help to protect and support employees who are caught up in a member's poor choices.

As biomedicine becomes increasingly enmeshed in modern life, biomedicalization processes have implications for reproductive policy, including abortion policy. Informed consent provisions have been a prominent trend in state-level abortion lawmaking in the United States in recent years. Modeled on the practice of securing informed consent for medical procedures, informed consent provisions stipulate the information a person must receive before they can consent to an abortion. Informed consent provisions purportedly require that this information be objective, scientifically accurate, and non-judgmental. Through an analysis of informed consent provisions in Texas abortion legislation from 1993 to 2015, this chapter explores how such provisions employ medical and biomedical tropes to frame regulations that restrict access to abortion care as ostensibly protecting women’s health and safety. I find that informed consent legislation in Texas selectively borrows from medical and biomedical lexicons, cites strategic empirical evidence, and co-opts medical techniques and experts in ways that encumber abortion access.

In both the academic and public policy realms, debates have gone on for decades concerning the influence of class-based interest groups on policymaking. Virtually no work in this area compares influence in the U.S. with influence in Canada despite the fact that the countries provide interesting differences in the social and political contexts within which influence may occur. In this chapter, we analyze how receiving money from the same business and labor entities (“political action committees” in the U.S.) influences similarity in voting among legislators in the 105th U.S. House of Representatives (1997–1998). We then perform the same analysis for the 36th Canadian House of Commons (1997–2000). In the U.S., we find that sharing business contributors significantly affects vote similarity among legislators, whereas sharing labor contributors does not. This supports elite-power and class-based theories and bolsters the arguments of those who feel more campaign finance reform may be necessary. In Canada, however, sharing contributors of either type has no effect on vote similarity among parliamentarians, which supports state-centered theory and lends credence to those arguing additional reforms may be unnecessary. These findings suggest that structural context matters greatly for patterns of political power.

Popular constitutionalists seek to recover the popular sovereignty foundations of American constitutionalism, bringing the people in as active participants in the constitutional enterprise as they create and refashion the Constitution by “majoritarian and populist mechanisms” (Amar, 1995, p. 89). The result is to recover an understanding, in FDR's words, of constitution as a “layman's document, not a lawyer's contract” (Kramer, 2004, p. 207). This understanding has deep roots in American constitutionalism, tracing its lineage back to the founding and, as popular constitutionalists insist, finds powerful expression in the likes of The Federalist and Abraham Lincoln (Ackerman, 1991; Tushnet, 1998). In exercising popular sovereignty, the people founded the Constitution, but they did not simply retreat from the trajectory of constitutional development. Rather, as Bruce Ackerman argues, since the Constitution of 1787 the people have spoken in a manner that has re-founded the Constitution giving us a “multiple origins originalism” (Kersch, 2006a, p. 801; see also Amar, 1998 and 2005). In turning to founding era thought and the notion of constitutional foundations, popular constitutionalists like Ackerman and Amar make common cause with conservatives who turn to original intent, but then they seek to synthesize this understanding with democratic expressions of popular will by emphasizing both formal and informal constitutional change, giving us layered “foundings,” and a more complex version of “living constitutionalism.” Such constitutional change, however, can only legitimately come from an authentic expression of “We the People.”

Fifty years ago the political scientist Robert Dahl concluded that courts are usually in sync with “the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities” and thus offer little help to aggrieved minorities (Dahl, 1957, p. 285). In recent years, Dahl's classic formulation has received renewed attention. This chapter uses the example of the Rehnquist Court's First Amendment decisions to analyze “regime politics” theory. On religion cases the Rehnquist Court was generally in sync with the socially conservative strain in the Republican Party, but in other First Amendment areas the pattern is far more complex, raising questions about the relationship between conservative judges and the political movements that brought them to office.

The US Congress is a racialized governing institution that plays an important role structuring the racial hierarchy in the nation. Despite Congress’s influence, there is little theoretical and empirical research on its racialized structure – that is, how it operates and the racial processes that shape it. This lacuna has developed from a narrow conceptualization of Congress as a political institution, and it ignores how it is a multifaceted organization that features a large and complex workplace. Congressional staff are the invisible force in American policymaking, and it is through their assistance that members of Congress can fulfill their responsibilities. However, the congressional workplace is stratified along racial lines. In this chapter, I theorize how the congressional workplace became racialized, and I identify the racial processes that maintain a racialized workplace today. I investigate how lawmakers have organized their workplace and made decisions about which workers would be appropriate for different types of roles in the Capitol. Through a racial analysis of the congressional workplace, I show a connection between Congress as an institution and workplace and how racial domination is a thread that connects and animates both its formal and informal structures.

In this chapter, the author draws on a historical case study of the Australian wine industry to explore variations in collective agency. The inductively derived process model illustrates the emergence of a new profession of scientific winemaking, which unfolds in three phases. Each phase is characterized by a distinct form of agency: distributed agency during the earliest phase, coordinated agency during later phases, and orchestrated agency during consolidation. In addition to exploring the temporal shifts in agency, the study includes a detailed analysis of the early stages of distributed agency, examining how collective agency is achieved in the absence of shared intentions.