American Congress Reform In 1970s And Seniority Development

This dissertation intends to probe into the origin, development and reform of congress committees' system and congressman seniority system. It is composed three sections: the introduction, the main body and the conclusion.The introduction mainly reviews the previous research work on this subject by American and Chinese scholars and provides with my main viewpoints of this dissertation.The main body is made up of three parts. The first part explores the origin of congress committees' chairmen seniority. It first reviews the development of committees' chairmen seniority and records the progress of congress reform in 1940's. The second part expounds the dynamics of congress reform in 1970's and introduces the course of the reform and tries to describe the characteristics of the reform. The third part is composed of four topics, mainly on the impact of seniority reform, including the failure manifestation of seniority reform, the reason of failure and significance of reform. The last topic discusses the development of congressman seniority in 1990's.The conclusion summarizes the main viewpoints of this dissertation, briefly analyzes the characteristics of American political system, points out the reason of the failure of seniority reform and promotes some suggestions for our county's development of political system.