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Preface
The origins of this project can be traced back to work I began as a doctoral student in the winter of 1996 at the University of Florida. At that time, I was taking a seminar on the US Congress and desperately searching for a research design topic. While watching the news one evening, I learned that President Clinton had just signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a piece of legislation that was touted as a bold and far-reaching revision of US communications laws. To me, this brief news story raised important scholarly questions. How did Congress, a deliberative institution prone to policy stalemate rather than bold action, manage to enact such a sweeping change in the law? What political, social, institutional, or other types of changes had enabled Congress to pass this sweeping change after nearly twenty years of concerted effort? Over time, these basic queries evolved into more precise ones as I struggled to develop a theory-driven