Stein and Bickers explore the policy subsystems--links among members of Congress, interest groups, government agencies--that blanket the American political landscape. They employ a new data base detailing federal outlays to Congressional districts for each federal program to examine four myths about the impact of policy subsystems on American government: that policy subsystems are a major contributor to the federal deficit, that federal programs grow and rarely die, that subsystem actors seek to universalize the scope of program benefits, and that the flow of program benefits to constituencies ensures legislators' reelection.

This book details the policy subsystems - links among members of Congress, interest groups, program beneficiaries, and federal and subnational government agencies - that blanket the American political landscape. Robert Stein and Kenneth Bickers have constructed a new data-base detailing federal outlays to congressional districts for each federal program, and use it to examine four myths about the impact of policy subsystems on American government and democratic practice. These include the myth that policy subsystems are a major contributor to the federal deficit; that, once created, federal programs grow inexorably and rarely die; that, to garner support for their programs, subsystem actors seek to universalize the geographic scope of program benefits; and that the flow of program benefits to constituencies in congressional districts ensures the reelection of legislators. The authors conclude with an appraisal of proposals for reforming the American political system, including a balanced budget amendment, a presidential line-item veto, term limitations, campaign finance reform, and the reorganization of congressional committees.

This collection of original essays honors the influential work of medievalist Robert W. Hanning. Contributors cover a wide range of fields within medieval studies, from Anglo-Saxon England to twelfth-century European intellectual culture, and from Chaucer's age to nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism, including a rich section on Italian Renaissance humanism and visual art. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, the essays in this volume are united in their emphases on the complex ways in which these sources are situated in their own time, mediated historically through other texts and other readers, and read within the context of contemporary social questions and disciplinary structures. This collection will be appreciated by all scholars and students of medieval studies.

It has long been a commonplace of literary history that in the twelfth century, first in the French-speaking territories controlled by the Anglo-Norman and Capetian ruling families, and especially within the milieu of the English royal court, antique and chivalric romances appear simultaneously with a new kind of historical chronicle driven by contemporary affairs. In short order, historiography and romance, whether written in Latin or in the vernaculars, became culturally dominant kinds of narrative expression throughout the rest of Europe. Why did this happen? Why did these two new kinds of writing appear simultaneously and spread so rapidly within the same cultural milieu? In Reality Fictions, Robert M. Stein argues that the emergence of historiography and romance was linked to large-scale transformations in the structure of power attendant on Capetian and Anglo-Norman state-making. He maintains that an understanding of the changes in the twelfth-century literary constellation requires us to consider the structure of literary production as a whole and in its relation to the world from which it emerges and to which it responds. Stein argues that romance and history writing grew out of the same cultural need and were intended to perform the same cultural tasks, thus determining their simultaneous appearance, rapid development, and formal affinities. In the rearrangements of power that were part of the state-making designs of Capetian and Anglo-Norman ruling families, new imaginative and conceptual entities became matters demanding serious representation, often in new discursive configurations, and often for the first time-the boundaries between self and other, the experience of eros, the differentiation of public from private life all took on new contours. A brilliant study of literary innovation, Reality Fictions provides a new understanding of the large variety of overlapping institutional, epistemological, and practical structures of power that the European Middle Ages presents to us and the ways that dislocations and transformations of power are registered in the consciousness of those who live through them.