Heavy Lifting: the Job of the American Legislature.

• Author: Straayer, John A.
• Position: Book Review

Heavy Lifting: The Job of The American Legislature by Alan Rosenthal. July 2004. CQ Press, Washington, D.C., 250 pages, $34.95.

Alan Rosenthal strikes again. Arguably the nation's foremost expert and author on American legislatures, he has written or coauthored a bookcase full of publications on our legislatures, several in just the last decade.

His latest, Heavy Lifting: The Job of the American Legislature, is an extraordinarily informative and readable volume. It was born of decades of direct observation and interaction with legislators and a thorough grasp of the academic literature on the subject, a goodly slice of which he produced himself.

Rosenthal builds his treatment of legislatures upon a combination of classic and contemporary scholarly literature, his years of observation and experience in the institutions, and the fruits of his new and recently completed research in, and on, five state legislatures--Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Vermont and Washington state. His major topics:

* Representation--how members serve their districts and express constituent views.

* Lawmaking--the obstacles and challenges in the process and how majorities are assembled to get the job done.

* Balance--the legislature's struggles with the executive, which, most often, seems to enjoy the upper hand.

Rosenthal begins with a discussion of what legislatures do and ends with an analysis of how we may assess the quality of the institutions.

Although state legislatures are similar in most basic organizational and procedural respects, they also differ...