Tribune of the People: The Minnesota Legislature and Its Leadership

by Royce Hanson, Patrick McCormack, Charles Backstrom

Book Overview

Tribune of the People was first published in 1990.The Minnesota legislature enjoys a national reputation for confronting difficult state problems and devising innovative ways of dealing with them. In... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816617902
• ISBN13: 9780816617906
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great service

I got the book in record time and it was in great shape...the price was great too.

A unique study of a state legislature.

I am listed as a co-author of this book. I helped with the study of the Minnesota Legislature that engendered this book. The study took place from 1984-1986, and was commissioned by the Minnesota Legislature. The study was a rich and layered look at the Minnesota Legislature, and at how state legislatures have changed over time. If there is an animating finding in this book, it is a working hypothesis that state government has grown complex, and that therefore state legislatures need to professionalize. This belief gives rise to a call for higher pay for legislators, for annual budgeting periods, and for unicameralism. Many of these reform suggestions are animated by a concern for the increasing empowerment of the executive branch, at the expense of legislative powers and governance. Twenty years later, the book is still quite good. Some details need to be brushed up, yet the sections of the book charting the changes from the non-partisan legislatures of the middle twentieth century to the more partisan era today are decent and have held the test of time. I admit to a bias in favor of this book, which I helped research and in a very small sense write. It would not be of interest to any who is not a lover of state legislatures, or of the Minnesota legislature, or both.