The Blue Dog Coalition: Impact of a Single-Issue Caucus from the 104th to the 110th Congress

The Blue Dog Coalition is an informal organization of legislators within the House of Representatives that strives to influence policy on fiscal responsibility, attract the attention of the electorate, They are a group that elicits wide range of reactions covering the length of the political spectrum, but despite this, their claims of special defense of fiscal conservatism within the Democratic Party have gone relatively undocumented by the academic community.This project has integrated a party literature with a caucus literature, in the attempt of building a novel framework for research. Work on polarization, the significance of parties, the purpose and history of caucuses all have been fused in such away that the Blue Dogs have created an opportunity to test broad congressional questions on a caucus-microcosm scale. Three important questions have emerged from the many possible avenues of exploration on the topic: How does admission into the Blue Dog Coalition effect voting behavior - measured by interest, ideology, and party unityscores? How does party leadership delegate prestigious committee assignments, a traditional indicator of partisan favor and influence, towards Blue Dogs? Can we use the Blue Dog Coalition as an indicator of fiscal conservatism? To each of these questions, a number of interesting results emerged. Blue Dogs, in the 104th scored higher in conservative interest group scores, more towards the center in ideological methods, and lower in party unity Dogs began to behave closer to their Democratic counterparts. In addition, membership on these select committees rose from a very small number to greater proportional parity within the Democratic Party. Perhaps most interesting, the Blue Dog Coalition does behave as a significant, independent predictor effect on NTU scores, a variable used to demonstrate fiscal conservatism. This research has shown, first and foremost, that it is useful and practical to applyold arguments within the party literature to a smaller, caucus level of analysis that is relatively untouched by the political science field. For the Blue Dogs, specifically, we have tested the validity of their claims in an attempt to reach broader questions ofdemocratic responsibility and electoral clarity. This work, and other work I have drawn upon, has barely scratched the surface on Blue Dog Democrats and other caucuses of comparable influence and popularity, and there remains a wealth of research material onthis caucus alone to be explored by scholars in the field of congressional politics.

British Monetary Sovereignty: A Cultural Analysis

In this thesis, I will document and analyze historical aspects of the British debate over adopting a common currency with the European Community primarily during the last half of the twentieth century until the present. More specifically, while on the surface such a decision would seem to turn on economic or political considerations, I will show that this historic British decision not to surrender their pound sterling in exchange for the euro was rooted in the nation's cultural identity. During this decades long British debate over the euro, two opposing, but strongly held, positions developed; one side believed that Britain had a compelling interest in bonding with the rest of Europe economically as well as politically, the other side believed that Britain's independent heritage was deeply rooted in many of its traditions including maintaining control of its own monetary matters, which included keeping its pound sterling. As part of this thesis, I have conducted interviews with business leaders, economists, and social scientists as well as researched public records in order to assess many of the arguments favoring and opposing Britain's adoption of the euro. Many Britons strongly believed that it was time to join other Europeans, who were willing to sacrifice their sovereign currency to a bold common currency experiment, while other Britons viewed the pound sterling as too integral a part of British heritage to abandon. Ultimately, British leaders and citizens had to determine whether such a currency tradeoff would be worth it to them as a nation. It was a gamble that twelve other nations (at the time of the euro's 2002 launch) were ready to take, optimistically calculating that easier credit and reduced exchange transaction costs would lead to greater economic prosperity. Many asserted that only with ! ! such a united European monetary coalition would Europe's nations be able to compete trade-wise with powerful economic nations like the United States and China. My conclusion is that Britain's refusal to join the euro was a decision that had less to do with economic opportunity or political motivations and much more to do with how the British people viewed themselves culturally and their identity as an independent nation.