INTRODUCTION

The notion that different issues are characterized by different politics shaped much of the earlier work on policy making, where it was common to classify issues by the political environment within which they were conceived. For example, Lowi (1964) and Wilson (1974) focus on the degree of concentration of costs and benefits, in order to group different policies by their distributive nature. Fiorina (1982) argues that issues benefiting a few key special interests at the expense of everyone else will be unpopular and are therefore good candidates for legislators to delegate to regulatory agencies. Ripley and Franklin (1984) similarly arrange policies into six different areas, each with its own distinct pattern of interest-group mobilization and congressional–executive relations.

Many analyses of congressional lawmaking follow a similar scheme of distinguishing issue areas by their political patterns. Fenno (1973), in his classic work on the committee system, analyzed six House committees and argued that differences in external constraints, subcommittee power, partisanship, and specialization all influenced the relative overall success of these committees in enacting legislation. Cox and McCubbins (1993) also organize committees according to the political environment within which they conduct business, focusing on the homogeneity or heterogeneity of their clientele group and whether the externalities of the policies they generate are targeted, mixed, or uniform.