Donkey work: redefining the Democratic Party in an 'age of conservatism,' 1972-1984 by Andelic, P, Davies, G

“…Again and again, the legislature displayed a remarkable facility for undermining iconoclasm and stalling policy experimentation. Institutional reforms in the early 1970s, supposed to reinvigorate the Congress and the congressional Democratic Party, actually succeeded only in intensifying the fragmentation of both. …”