Volume 6, Issue 3

Evaluations of majority party leaders come from three main sources: political scientists, media analysts, and members of Congress. Political scientists are the theoreticians. They have defined concepts and developed theories for evaluating leadership style, strategy, and strength. Journalists are the watchdogs. They regularly evaluate leader performance in response to contemporary events. Members of Congress then serve as the judges and juries. They occasionally advise leaders on tactics and strategies, and they ultimately have the ability to sanction or reward leaders.

One must grade House Republicans on a curve. As co-partisans of President Bush, they were the party of government. As the minority in the House, they were also the party of opposition. This combination severely limited their power and political choices. Nevertheless, they did manage to win some defensive victories and score some public-relations points.

The US Senate is a diffuse and individualistic body that is notoriously hard to lead. Somewhat ironically, the job of the Senate Minority Leader on Capitol Hill today is probably easier than that of his majority counterpart, since the Minority Leader is largely absolved of the expectation that a party policy agenda can actually be passed through a chamber where it is far easier for the minority party to obstruct legislation. During the 110th Congress Mitch McConnell proved quite a successful Minority Leader in terms of unifying his party, command of Senate procedures and using those procedures for party advantage. Despite his successes in frustrating the Senate Democrats, McConnell was unable to overcome the deep unpopularity of his fellow Republican, President George W. Bush, and of the Republican Party in general. As a result the Senate GOP appears certain to suffer further losses in the 2008 elections, thereby demonstrating the disconnect between effective leadership inside the Senate chamber and electoral success.

In evaluating leaders, the leader's own criteria or the evaluator's can set the mark and the two may well lead to quite different judgments. If our primary aim is to understand leadership strategy and behavior, we need to focus on the first; but if we also want to say something about how the institution performs, we often need to tackle the second as well. In this essay, I contend that the procedures and practices of unorthodox lawmaking, especially the most actively used ones, are now mostly tools of party leaders--of the majority leadership in the House and, to a considerable extent, of the minority leadership in the Senate. I focus here on how the Pelosi leadership team in the House and the McConnell team in the Senate are employing what used to be unorthodox practices and procedures as central elements of their leadership strategies, and the consequences thereof for Congress as an institution.

Congressional scholars have devoted considerably more attention to describing and explaining congressional leadership than to evaluating it. The election of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives provides fresh occasion for consideration of normative criteria for assessing leadership performance. In this article we develop a set of normative criteria grounded in congressional leadership theory. We discuss recent speakerships in relationship to these criteria. We then assess Speaker Pelosi's performance in the 110th Congress. We conclude that by each criterion, she has provided effective leadership; however, we regard any assessment at this point to be provisional. Important tests of her leadership are yet to come.

Congress has long been unpopular with the American public, with approval numbers above fifty percent serving as the exception rather than the norm. In this essay we argue that such disapproval stems not from calculated reaction to policy outcomes or partisan attachments. Rather, people tend to disapprove of Congress for exactly the thing it was designed to be: an open and deliberative lawmaking body. The more Congress does its job, the more the public tends to disapprove.

The termination of communist systems of political rule in Eastern Europe between 1989-91 gave rise to the widespread belief in anti-Castro circles that such endings and new beginnings were feasible in Cuba. This `model' based on `scenario building' has turned out not to be the case in the course of the past several decades. The purpose of this paper is to explain why the East European models (because there are a variety of systems in that area) did not materialize in Cuba. The limits of analogy in international affairs are revealed in the unique as well as universal characteristics of communist types of regimes.

The RePass article (The Forum, Vol. 6, Issue 2, 2008), continues the tradition of writers using the National Election Survey data of defining "ideology" as the answer to the liberal-conservative self-labeling question, and fails to consider the structure of substantive public policy attitudes and values as a necessary indicator of ideology.