Bruce I. Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer's research primarily focuses on Congress and American political institutions. His primary current interest examines how process changes have affected the ability of Congress to develop energy policy over the past half century. He is co-editor (with Lawrence Dodd) of Congress Reconsidered, the 9th edition of which was published by CQ Press in 2009. Oppenheimer's book, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation, co-authored with Frances Lee, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress. In addition, he has recently worked on projects examining why African-American House members rarely run for the U.S. Senate (with Gbemende Johnson and Jennifer Selin) and analyzing the effect of Iraq War deaths on congressional elections (with Christian Grose). He has been both an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow and a Brookings Institution Fellow and Guest Scholar.

Representative publications

• “It’s Hard to Get Mileage Out of Congress: Struggling Over CAFE Standards, 1973-2013,”in Jeffrey Jenkins and Eric Pastashnik, eds. Congress and Policy Making in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 272-298.
• Congress Reconsidered, 11th edition, (co-editor with Lawrence Dodd), Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2017.
• with Lawrence Dodd, “Congress in the Age of Trump: The 2016 National Elections and Their Aftermath,” in Congress Reconsidered, 11th ed., Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2017: 451-478.
• “The House as a Stepping Stone to the Senate: Why Do So Few African-American House Members Run,” American Journal of Political Science, 56:2 (April, 2012): 587-99 (with Gbemende Johnson and Jennifer L. Selin).