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This article discusses, in brief, about some of the papers presented at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, held in San Francisco, California. All these papers have a common theme to bring legislative affairs into the limelight. The paper "A Tools of the Trade' Look at the Comparing Congress with State Legislatures" offers a primer on comparing and contrasting U.S. Congress with the American state legislatures. The paper "Senate Apprenticeship in Historical Perspective" addresses the conventional wisdom among U.S. senators.

This paper examines the relationship between legislative election outcomes in California and the partisan predispositions of district electorates as reflected in voter registration data. It gauges the extent to which Democratic candidates for Congress and the state legislature over a two-decade period have failed to receive electionday support commensurate with their party's district registration, and it considers how this shortfall is affected by a series of intervening variables. The analysis develops and tests criteria by which political practitioners and observers can assess the electability of legislative candidates. Further, it addresses such issues as incumbency effects, the relative weakness of the legislative candidates of the president's party in midterm elections, and nascent Republican realignment beginning with the 1980 election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]