Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? The Impact of Information on Mass Attitudes toward Congress

Two features of citizen response to Congress can be taken as grounds for concern. First, Americans know relatively little about Congress, and especially about congressional procedures and policy output. Second, Congress typically emerges as the least respected political institution. Although these matters are troubling when viewed individually, more disturbing is the dilemma posed when knowledge and attitudes toward Congress are viewed in tandem. It appears that citizens who know Congress the best like Congress the least. Consequently, a sophisticated polity and a well-respected legislature seem fundamentally incompatible. This article seeks to resolve this dilemma, contending that there is nothing about knowledge per se that leads citizens to view Congress unfavorably. Rather, differences in knowledge levels alter the considerations citizens bring to bear when evaluating Congress, with the best-informed individuals constructing judgments on the basis of the most relevant Congress-specific criteria while less knowledgeable citizens employ readily available but more peripheral criteria.     

Testing the implications of incivility in the United States Congress, 1977–2000: The case of judicial confirmation delay

The research argues that there are two empirically distinct types of conflict in the United States Congress. The first is partisan conflict or the relative divergence of the two major parties on policy issues. The second is the level of civility that characterises legislative processes in the country. Two unique measures of ‘civility’ are developed. The first is based on media reporting and the second on the coding of almanac summaries. The new indices are tested in an event history analysis of judicial confirmation delay that controls for partisan conflict and a multitude of logistical and contextual concerns that earlier research has argued are important. The analysis is fruitful; measures of partisan conflict are significant as are many other concerns. Most notably, however, the new indicators of aggregate civility perform as expected, and the delay prospective jurists experience can also be attributed to changes in levels of civility.     

The property-contract boundary: an economic analysis of leases

This paper examines how the legal design of a leasing arrangementaffects the value of the leased asset. The model focuses onthe incentive problems that arise when the ownership and useof an asset are separated. The results suggest that an efficientlydesigned lease may involve elements of property law, contractlaw, or both. This conclusion helps explain why the law of leaseshas historically occupied the nexus between these two areasof the common law.