New Books In Journalism

In considering how legislation moves forward in the American political system, we often think about elected representatives sitting in committee hearings or Senators speaking from the floor of the Senate to make a particular point. Woven into all of these ideas, which are not misguided, is the role (often behind the scenes) that congressional leaders play in trying to wrangle their caucuses to vote for or against legislation.  In The Politics of Herding Cats: When Congressional Leaders Fail (U Michigan Press, 2021), Political Scientist John Lovett leads us into these processes and assumptions and unpacks the ways that congressional leaders are far less able to exert control over their caucuses because of the ways that individual members are able to pursue attention through the changing media landscape. While Lovett provides a coda at the end of the book indicating that social media, especially Twitter, has an outsized role in the ways that individual members can capture attention, the focus of the book is to