Maya L. Kornberg: Stuck - How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress
Political scientist Maya Kornberg explains why fifty years of reform efforts have failed to fix Congress, and what structural forces block democratic change.
Why we picked this
Kornberg's research at the Brennan Center puts hard data behind what most people sense intuitively: Congress is broken by design, not by accident, and the forces keeping it stuck are more entrenched than any single election can fix.
Why haven’t fifty years of reform efforts fixed Congress? Maya Kornberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, has spent years studying the structural forces (money, media, and political violence) that block meaningful democratic change in the legislative branch.
Her book Stuck examines the specific mechanisms through which campaign financing pressures, staffing limitations, social media effects, and political polarization have made Congress resistant to reform across decades of effort. The analysis goes beyond partisan blame to identify the systemic architecture of congressional dysfunction.
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