First published in 1987, Congress: Structure and Policy is a review of congressional research from an institutional perspective. The selections blend theoretical material found in the fields of discussion theory, political economy, social choice and game theory, with classics on such standard topics as elections and campaigning, controlling the bureaucracy and oversight, norms of behaviour, committees and committee assignments reform, budgeting, presidential influence, and the party and its leadership. Together, these readings present an institutional theory of Congress. They are integrated in order to address both the short-run issue of how congressional institutions shape policy and the long-run question of why congressional organization has evolved the way it has. In their introductions to the chapters, the editors, Professors McCubbins and Sullivan, not only address the themes of the individual readings but place the chapters in the larger context of the political economy.

In what James A. Baker III has called the ""worst job in Washington,"" the chief of staff orchestrates the president's conduct of the U.S. government. He holds the unique responsibility to magnify the time, reach, and voice of the president of the United States. ""You need a filter, a person that you have total confidence in who works so closely with you that in effect he is almost an alter ego,"" Gerald Ford has said. In this volume, resulting from the Washington Forum on the Role of the White House Chief of Staff, held in 2000 in Washington, D.C., twelve of the fifteen men who have held the office of chief of staff discuss among themselves and with a select group of participants the challenges, achievements, and failures of their time in that role. Their purpose is to find lessons in governing that will help future chiefs of staff prepare to assume the office and organize the staffs they will lead. These pages of frank and uncensored discussion present in question-and-answer format the voices of the chiefs of staff as they discuss the transition from campaign to governance, the reelection drive every four years, and ultimately, the closing out of an administration. The group also addresses the place of the White House chief of staff within the larger governing community of the Executive Branch, Congress, interest groups, and the press. The American White House sits at the nerve center of world history, and at the core of this nerve center, a massive bureaucratic operation exists to process the flow of information and policy. Because the White House chief of staff manages that operation, to ignore its requirements risks presidential fate itself and indeed, the fate of the republic.