In this book, James Curry provides new insights into the process by which legislative leaders manipulate the amount and form of information available to rank-and-file members during the lawmaking process. While centrally concerned with how and when members of the majority leadership restrict what members of their party become informed about as laws are being crafted and put through the legislative review process, the focus of Legislating in the Dark on information flows is, in fact, more general: It examines how the legislative majority systematically excludes the minority from deliberations about lawmaking and also the challenges that members of the majority leadership face in trying to understand and anticipate the concerns and behaviors of their own party’s membership more generally. Combining evidence from the author’s two stints in the House with systematic qualitative interviews and quantitative data analysis, the work is part of a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the institutional environment and leadership behavior that produce the most obvious and public form of legislative behavior: roll call votes.

Curry argues that legislative leaders limit the amount of information available to general members of the legislature as bills are being crafted and moved through the legislative process for two core reasons. The first is to limit the opportunity for those who would be opposed to the bill, most often members of the minority party, to understand exactly what is at stake soon enough to craft effective and credible alternatives or mobilize effective opposition. The second reason is to protect delicate compromises and prevent dissent from within the majority party.

Supporting the first motivation, Curry presents evidence showing how members of the minority party are, until very late in the process, often unable to understand exactly what is being proposed or are prevented from effectively proposing alternatives or amendments by their very lack of information about what exactly is being considered. Similarly, for members of the majority party, Curry shows that these members frequently admit to making decisions largely on the basis of the very limited information provided by their party leadership, a situation exacerbated by maneuverings that allow legislative leaders to present final legislation very close to when it is to be considered. Moreover, the author shows that when substantial conflict is anticipated to arise, legislative leaders preempt these threats by building coalitions ahead of time and then using those coalition partners’ endorsements to convince members of the majority of the desirability of the compromise measure, even while often withholding key details about the bill or obscuring them in omnibus or complex measures that tax members’ abilities to understand exactly what is at stake.

Apart from simply elucidating the dynamics of lawmaking in the contemporary House, the strength of this work is to add to the growing body of work about how the decisions of legislative leaders and differences across members in effort and knowledge affect legislative outcomes. Put more strongly, the essence of leadership in the contemporary House is to shape what gets done by making possible certain legislative outcomes that would not be possible if the lawmaking process were fully open and deliberative. In many ways, this insight builds on foundational work about the power of agenda setting, but Curry goes further, suggesting that it reveals the fundamental limits of spatial models of legislative behavior or accounts that discount the value of leadership.

Here is where the book perhaps oversteps. In the contemporary House, where either party has a reasonable chance of retaking control of the chamber in the next election, a key question that members of the majority face is about the trade-off between their myopic individual goals of policymaking and reelection and their larger goals of continued control of the chamber. Thus, to note that leaders are powerful and manipulative is not to show evidence of agency loss, but instead, perhaps, an equilibrium in which party members delegate to party elites the need to craft multidimensional compromises that can both avoid unraveling in the House and survive in the Senate and with the president (setting aside for the moment the possibility that the legislative game is simply partisan theater before an electoral audience, which might itself be a game in which the rank and file are willing to delegate to their leaders). Thus, as Curry acknowledges, given that members of the majority care about many different elements of policy and to different degrees, a key question is how a party’s leadership can balance these competing demands while still getting something done.

Stepping back and reflecting on the body of scholarship we have about the operation of the House, for example canonical models of gains from trade and specialization, it is notable that a great deal of that work emerged during a time when partisan control of the chamber was much more certain. So the focus on how (often bipartisan) committees were in conflict with floor majorities and sometimes took advantage of their specialization and informational expertise or were allowed to pursue policy in their own domain while others chose their areas of focus (e.g., logrolling) is not surprising. Those accounts also stressed the multidimensional nature of members’ preferences and the lack of information that members had, but recognized that such patterns were equilibria in a larger behavioral pattern that allowed the House to operate despite conflicting preferences and priorities. What has been overlaid on this basic dynamic is now the majority–minority “game” in which the majority has to be much more careful about making sure that it can sustain its majority power, which has perhaps moved the core conflict from between committees and the floor to between the majority and the minority.

Seen from this perspective, the complex dynamic in which members of the majority (and minority) delegate to their leadership is one suggesting that the challenge is not the limits of a spatial model but of measurement. We have a hard time figuring out what exactly members want on policy grounds, how they weight the different dimensions of policy and their time horizons, and how these policy-oriented goals interact with their preferences over control of the chamber. The difficulty of measurement is compounded by the barriers to observing the behind-the-scenes choices and behaviors that lead up to floor votes, although it is notable, as Curry discusses in Chapter 7, that the pattern of the majority allowing its leadership to craft feasible compromises largely collapsed from within the Republican caucus with the rise of the Tea Party faction. Absent a willingness to assent to leadership compromises, Republicans advanced measures that failed or provided ample opportunities for Democrats to point out the extremity of the Republican coalition or undermine it. Overall, these patterns reinforce the general observation that deference to leadership is an extremely interesting equilibrium, one that, from the average member’s perspective, may enhance rather than degrade his or her welfare. (In fact, thinking comparatively, it would be interesting to know whether back benchers in Westminster systems are similarly uninformed about their party’s legislative agenda.)

It is against this backdrop that Curry’s central finding—whatever normative or ideological ideals we might have—is that the contemporary House is not a fully open or deliberative body, but a (sometimes) functional body whose daily process of legislating is structured by extraconstitutional partisan considerations. How legislative compromises are crafted, the conflict between the majority and minority and between leadership and rank and file, remain important areas for inquiry and understanding. Curry’s important work provides new insights into the fact that members are, for better or for worse, often in the dark about the complex and critical details of important legislation.