Legitimate Opposition in Congress: The Struggle for Political Power.

This paper is a study in how minorities create legitimacy from their inferior position in Congress. As majorities design rules and norms that restrict the minority's legislative influence, these barriers limit the available strategies a minority can utilize to affect the legislative process. In the face of such institutional barriers, minorities must learn creative ways to challenge the dominance of existing rules and norms, assert their claim to a legislative role in Congress, and thereby gain growing policy influence. While such struggles are at one level a fight over specific rules and norms, at a deeper level they are disputes over what constitutes political legitimacy within a particular historical era. These disputes are to a considerable extent ideational in nature, involving divergent understandings of what constitutes a proper means of gaining and maintaining power in Congress.Of central concern is not simply or primarily how and when oppositions changed the rules and norms of Congress, their party, or the electoral processes. The deeper issue is how they developed and propagated their critique of the majorities legitimizing norms and how they crafted their own alternatives to a system of congressional control. How is it that minorities, lacking access to the institutional mechanisms of congressional control, nevertheless generate and sustain powerful critiques of the majorities that ultimately aid their own rise to power? Through a content analysis of Washington Post articles, I examine the evolution of liberal and conservative arguments as they struggled to change the legitimate organization of congressional power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]