Chapter 5 examines how collaboration varies across members. Nearly every member of Congress collaborates to some degree, but there is significant variation with some members coauthoring one or two policy proposals in a Congress and others forming relationships with fifty colleagues or more. Examining this variation reveals clear patterns in the characteristics of the most and least collaborative members and illustrates how collaboration is a function of a member's incentives and opportunities. Members who interested in policymaking are incentivized to collaborate more, and those who are well connected in Congress have more opportunities. Members representing competitive districts are more likely to collaborate with the other party, while those representing partisan districts work with their co-partisans. Consistent with social exchange theory, members collaborate to support their electoral and policy goals but are constrained by their ability to identify a worthwhile partner.

The period after Augustine saw no decline in catechesis. The writings associated with Quodvultdeus and several other anonymous sermons from North Africa in this period attest to the ongoing vibrancy of catechesis. In particular, these sermons highlight the way in which knowing God was understood in an apocalyptic age, when new threats from Vandal invasions and heretical resurgences destabilized many aspects of social life.

The Introduction lays out the primary questions underlying the book: What is the relationship between knowledge of God and the practices of teaching surrounding baptism? What is the role of historical study in understanding Christian epistemology? What role do theological commitments play in the forms of catechetical instruction? It also explains the use of the language of epistemology and catechetical literature, and it contains a chapter outline.

Chapter 5 investigates the Indian government’s anomalous accession to “paramountcy,” which led it to pursue the territorial annexation of princely states. Controversially, this process often necessitated the violation of Britain’s celebrated “rule of law” and brought the nation’s reputation for fair play into question. Seeking to check this expansionism, reformers amalgamated classical law of nations theories with the findings of contemporary international law treatises to defend the rights of native rulers in Awadh, Tanjore, the Carnatic, and Mysore. If India’s princely states were protected, reformers anticipated that their sovereigns would internalize constitutionalist values and provide employment for educated Indians who struggled to find positions in the exclusive colonial bureaucracy.

Chapter 3 introduces an innovative measure of collaboration in Congress based on internal communications in Congress known as Dear Colleague letters (DCLs). The chapter begins with a brief history of DCLs, tracing their usage back to the early twentieth century and showing how members use them to advertise and build support for their ideas among their colleagues. These letters shed new light on the day-to-day work of Congress, as members send them in the earliest stages of the policy process and across a wide range of policymaking activities, from bill introductions to letters to the executive branch. When members sign a letter together, they are claiming joint ownership of its content, reflecting an underlying collaborative relationships. These signatures are used to create a network representation of the collaborative Congress that accounts for the inherently relational dynamics of collaboration in the House of Representatives.

Congressional staff assert that collaborative policy is more successful, especially if the collaboration is bipartisan: Policy letters gain additional attention, invitations have a broader appeal, and bills are more likely to pass. Chapter 7 tests that assumption by examining the outcomes of collaborative legislation. At every stage of the legislative process, collaborative bills are more successful than single-author bills. Collaborative legislation attracts more cosponsors and is more likely to be reported out of committee, pass the House, and be enacted. Bipartisan bills do particularly well, particularly for rank-and-file members with limited institutional power, but majority party members also benefit from partisan collaboration. By working together, members can signal that a bill has broad support – either within or across the political parties – and facilitate a smoother legislative process from introduction to enactment. Thus, collaboration is a valuable tool for members of Congress seeking to advance their agenda.

This chapter summarizes the findings of each chapter, recognizing the project’s limitations as well as offering prospects for future research. Finally, in a more speculative register, it describes the implications of the preceding chapters for an account of catechesis guided by the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Catechesis echoes the incarnation of the Word in its medial position. Bridging heavenly and earthly knowledge, catechesis is a concrete practice that proffers true knowledge of God, the transcendent source of being, from within the finite conditions of material life.

As the first study of collaboration in Congress, this book significantly expands our understanding of why members of Congress often choose to work together in a polarized Congress and often do so across party lines. Chapter 8 reviews the book's key findings: (a) members of Congress collaborate on substantive policy initiatives, (b) they are strategic about when and with whom to collaborate, and (c) collaborative legislation is more successful at every stage of the legislative process. The chapter concludes with discussions of the implications of this study for understanding legislative behavior and congressional policymaking, avenues for future research, and the outlook for the collaborative Congress and ways to support it in the years ahead.

Chapter 4 examines how collaboration varies across issue area and policy substance. Dear Colleague letters are classified into one of twenty issue areas based on the comparative agendas project coding scheme, and for each issue area, the proportions of letters that are noncollaborative, bipartisan, and partisan are identified. Examining why some issues are more collaborative than others reveals that collaboration – particularly bipartisan collaboration – is more common on issues that do not fall neatly onto a liberal–conservative scale, where compromise and common ground are easier to find, and on issues that are on the majority party agenda, where there are more opportunities to create policy by incorporating an idea into a larger, moving bill. The second part of the chapter considers the significance of collaborative policy and establishes that members of Congress routinely coauthor substantive policy proposals, and this is not a phenomenon limited to naming of post offices. These findings support the social exchange theory of collaboration by providing evidence of how expected costs and benefits shape the likelihood of collaboration.

The colonial state’s institutionalized secrecy had produced an anomaly that reformers were keen to resolve. Britons – even those who prided themselves on their humanitarian dispositions – were seemingly unconcerned about the fates of millions of their fellow subjects on the subcontinent. To address this apathy and provide Indians with a greater role in policymaking, reformers attempted to construct an entirely new social formation that is the focus of Chapter 4: an imperial civil society based on inter-associational linkages. Early reformers in the metropole endorsed the establishment of societies in the Indian presidency towns that could provide reliable information on local conditions. Webs of contact also developed on an individual level, as veteran reformers in Britain advised members of the incipient Bombay Association on constitutionalist techniques. Intent on improving deteriorating race-relations in the 1870s, the East India Association continued to identify strategies to increase Britons’ awareness of Indian issues and facilitate the expression of native public opinion.

This chapter surveys some of the key themes in epistemology and pedagogy in antique philosophical and classical education and early Christianity that illuminate the rise of Christian catechesis. Critical topics include the role of memory and the use of regula or “canons” of truth and the emergence of teachers and “school churches” in second-century Rome.

Augustine’s corpus allows the observation of several interesting aspects of the interrelation between pedagogy and knowledge. In particular, he demonstrates the way in which a Platonic-informed illuminationist epistemology can be transformed by a christologically shaped view of love. Looking primarily at De catechizandis rudibus and credal sermons, this chapter examines how Augustine understood love to be the central issue for knowing God in catechesis. It also explores how debates with Manichaeism and Donatism shaped Augustine’s view of the role of catechesis.

The book concludes by examining reformers’ visions for political integration between metropole and colony, which required both the Indianization of the exclusive Indian Civil Service and parliamentary representation for taxed Indian subjects. These proposals, however, generated conflict within the East India Association and exposed fractures between the radical agitators and the retired officials who had begun to swamp the organization. Gesturing to the afterlife of India reformism, the epilogue further identifies the factors that led to the decay of East India Association’s intra-imperial network and offers a reexamination of the 1908 sedition trial of Indian nationalist B. G. Tilak in which the accused copiously referenced reformist polemic to legitimize his agitation.

Reformers chastised the colonial administration for its extractive military-fiscalism and its inability to generate new “state-ideas” as a peacetime power. Public works constructed under native rule had widely fallen into despair; in the Company era, the government rarely expended more than 1 percent of its revenue on their maintenance. In Chapter 3, I argue that reformers considered this parsimony to be an anomalous departure from both pre-colonial and metropolitan precedents. Aligning themselves with Sir Arthur Cotton, a doyen of irrigative canal engineering, they developed a biopolitical state-idea that tasked the colonial state with the preservation of human life. At the same time, they rebuked the colonial bureaucracy for its culture of obfuscation and demanded the establishment of a new “state-system” rooted in transparency.