CANCELED: Ruth Bloch Rubin - "Divided Parties, Strong Leaders"

*THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE SOON!*

Ruth Bloch Rubin will discuss her new book Divided Parties, Strong Leaders. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE

About the Author: Ruth Bloch Rubin is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she studies the U.S. Congress, political parties, and American political history. She has authored two books about legislative power dynamics: Building the Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Divided Parties, Strong Leaders (University of Chicago Press, 2025). She is currently writing a third book, tentatively titled Legislating Rights: Congress and the Making of American Indian Law, that details legislative efforts to make — and remake — twentieth-century federal Indian law.  

She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Political Science in 2014. From 2014-2016, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University.  

About the Book: Drawing on nearly a century of legislative history, this careful account invites readers to think anew about when, why, and how leaders of divided parties wield power in Congress.

For decades, legislative scholars have viewed party divisions as critical constraints on congressional leadership. The more a party's rank and file disagree with one another, the weaker their leaders are predicted to be; as member preferences converge, leader power is thought to increase.

In a powerful corrective to this prevailing view, Ruth Bloch Rubin argues that party divisions are not inherently limiting. Divided Parties, Strong Leaders highlights and examines variation in how members of party factions choose to work together. She shows that leaders of divided parties are well positioned to overcome, and even draw strength from, their divided ranks when the collaborative efforts of their coalitions' competing factions are evenly matched. By contrast, their capacity to get what they want is more limited when one faction has out-collaborated its competition. Presenting detailed case studies of some of the most storied leaders of the postwar Congress, including Speakers Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi, Bloch Rubin analyzes the factional configuration each leader encountered and explains why it mattered for their exercise of power.