In this week’s episode of Politics In Question, Ruth Bloch Rubin joins Julia, Lee, and James to consider how Congress may work in the new year. Bloch Rubin is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She studies American politics, with a substantive focus on legislative institutions, political parties, and American political development. Bloch Rubin is the author of Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

How will the 117th Congress function differently? Can the House and Senate change the way they operate? Will intraparty factions challenge both chambers’ centralized party structure? These are some of the questions Ruth, Julia, Lee, and James discuss in this week’s episode.