Congress regularly enacts laws that benefit particular groups or localities while imposing costs on everyone else. Sometimes, however, Congress breaks free of such parochial concerns and enacts bills that serve the general public, not just special interest groups. In this book, the author offers a theory that explains not only why special interest frequently triumph but also why the general public sometimes wins. By showing how legislative leaders build coalitions for both types of programs, he illuminates recent legislative decisions in such areas as economic, tax, and energy policy. The author's theory of policy making rests on a reinterpretation of the relationship between legislators' actions and their constituents' policy preferences. Most scholars explore the impact that citizens' existing policy preferences have on legislators' decisions. They ignore citizens who have no opinions because they assume that uninformed citizens cannot possibly affect legislators' choices. Arnold examines the influence of citizens' potential preferences, however, and argues that legislators also respond to these preferences in order to avoid future electoral problems. He shows how legislators estimate the political consequences of their voting decisions, taking into account both the existing preferences of attentive citizens and the potential preferences of inattentive citizens. He then analyzes how coalition leaders manipulate the legislative situation in order to make it attractive for legislators to support a general interest bill

R. Douglas Arnold is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has broad interests in American politics, with special interests in congressional politics, national policymaking, representation, the mass media, and Social Security. The author of Congress and the Bureaucracy: A Theory of Influence; The Logic of Congressional Action; and Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability, he also edited Framing the Social Security Debate: Values, Politics, and Economics. He has been a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a recipient of grants from the Ford, Dirksen, Earhart, and National Science Foundations, and the recipient of the Richard F. Fenno prize in legislative studies. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ph.D. Yale University.