front cover of Legislatures
Legislatures
Comparative Perspectives on Representative Assemblies
Gerhard Loewenberg, Peverill Squire, and D. Roderick Kiewiet, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Although a great deal is known about the United States Congress, the differences and similarities between it and the legislatures and parliaments of other countries have not been extensively studied. This book--by a distinguished group of legislative specialists from ten countries--fills this gap by presenting legislative research from a comparative, cross-national perspective.
Consisting of fourteen essays, this volume incorporates major areas of legislative research, including studies of recruitment of legislators and an overview of their careers, the evolution of legislatures, and the electoral systems by which legislatures are chosen. Each contributor reviews the principal research findings and emphasizes those concepts and methods that facilitate comparative research. The book assesses the state of knowledge in regard to U.S., European, Asian, and Latin American legislatures. The introductory chapter by the editors identifies how to comparatively test research findings while taking into account data availability and questions of conceptual equivalence. Each chapter provides an extensive bibliography, making the book an excellent guide to literature on legislative research. The contributors are David T. Canon, John M. Carey, Gary W. Cox, Frantisek Formanek, John R. Hibbing, Ewa Karpowicz, Junko Kato, Sadafumi Kawato, Michael Laver, Gary F. Moncrief, Chan Wook Park, Werner J. Patzelt, Bjorn Erik Rasch, Kenneth A. Shepsle, Steven S. Smith, and Rick K. Wilson.
This book is designed for faculty and graduate students in political science and will also be of interest to members of legislative research staffs in this country and overseas, and to specialists on legislatures in history and law.
Gerhard Loewenberg is University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor of Political Science. D. Roderick Kiewiet is Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Political Science, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Peverill Squire is Professor of Political Science, University of Iowa.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
The Southern Debate over Slavery
Volume 1: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1778-1864
Edited by Loren Schweninger
University of Illinois Press, 2001
An incomparably rich source of period information, The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to their state legislatures between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
 
These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. Petitioners were compelled to present the most accurate and fully documented case they could, since their claims would be subject to public scrutiny and legal verification. Unlike the many reminiscences and autobiographies of the period, these petitions record with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics, common understandings, and legal restrictions and parameters that shaped southern society during this period.
 
Arranged chronologically, with their original spelling and idiosyncratic phraseology intact, these documents reveal the grim and brutal nature of human bondage, the fears of whites who lived among large concentrations of blacks, and the workings of the complicated legal system designed to control blacks. They tell about the yearning of bondspeople to gain their freedom, the attitudes of freed blacks who were forced to leave the South, and the efforts of African Americans to overcome harsh and restrictive laws. They also underscore the unique situation of free women of color and the reliance of manumitted (formally freed) blacks on their former owners for protection, travel passes, guardianship papers, and reference letters.
 
Astonishingly intimate and frank,The Southern Debate over Slavery illuminates how slavery penetrated nearly every aspect of southern life and how various groups of southerners responded to the difficulties they confronted as a result of living in a slave society.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter