Political ReviewNet
First for Politics and International Relations Book Reviews

• Home
• Search Reviews
• About Political ReviewNet

Book Reviews

Each of these important books, written by a prominent scholar of party politics in the United States, contributes significantly to our understanding of intraparty politics and its consequences for state building and electoral outcomes. Each also revises the conventional wisdom about heavily studied periods in American political history. These fresh, original accounts of American party politics, though not entirely flawless, should be read by every serious student of political parties and American political development.

Scott C. James' Presidents, Parties, and the State, initially published in 2000, is already an influential and highly regarded work, having received both the Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the APSA for best book in American national policy and the Leon Epstein Award of the APSA Political Organizations and Parties Section for its contributions to the study of parties and political organizations. Alas, it has not yet received review in this journal, an oversight that is rectified here. Breaking from new institutionalist or interest group models of the emergence of the modern state, James' central theoretical contention is that the trajectory of regulatory state building in the United States has been profoundly shaped by political parties' efforts to win the presidency. As James shows, the importance of party politics to regulatory state building derives from the political constraints imposed by the Electoral College on parties' efforts to build presidential majorities. Because parties have to win a majority of Electoral College votes (rather than merely a popular majority) to win the presidency, they have strong incentives to craft their regulatory proposals to appeal primarily to highly competitive "swing" states that could throw the election to either party, and to unaffiliated constituencies whose votes are essential to winning those states. Yet this electoral imperative may often be in tension with the party's traditional regulatory commitments and with the interests of its core constituents. This is where party leaders-most often, presidents or members of the congressional leadership-come in: by deploying their resources, exercising their prerogatives, and engaging in rhetorical leadership, James suggests, party leaders can push their partisans to agree to regulatory policies departing substantially from the preferences of the median party member. Thus, he concludes, "parties matter," often significantly, for regulatory outcomes.

James illustrates his argument with careful historical case studies of three critical moments in the development of the modern regulatory state: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935. Significantly, each was presided over by the Democratic Party, the chronic minority party prior to 1936, and the historic defender of agrarianism and anti-statism. As James shows, in the first two cases Democratic Party leaders seeking to consolidate their electoral coalitions after fragile presidential victories induced their partisans to jettison their traditional antistatist preferences in favor of more expansive regulatory controls of railroads and trusts. By strategically repositioning the party in these two instances, Democrats were able to court swing constituencies critical to the capture of the presidency in each period-New York Mugwumps and Progressive Republicans, respectively. As a result, however, Democrats committed themselves to state building paths that recognized and implicitly legitimized the ascendance of corporate capitalism. The final case again shows the same electoral logic at work, but this time with very different consequences for state building. In this case, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers embraced a policy that, in a significant departure from the New Deal's regulatory approach to the management of big business, actually eliminated the enormous public utility holding companies. According to James, this throwback to the Democrats' agrarian anti-statist roots was crafted to appeal to the critically important Midwestern Progressive constituency, whose loyalty to New Dealism was tenuous.

The party system approach to regulatory choice advocated by James is highly sensitive to historical context. As James argues, party leaders' opportunities and constraints in strategically reorienting their parties' regulatory choices are deeply shaped by institutional developments such as the rise of the seniority system in Congress or the emergence of the modern presidency. This sensitivity to the interaction of changing historical patterns and recurrent political logics is characteristic of the best work in the field of American political development.

James uses both historical narrative and quantitative analysis of congressional voting data to advance his theoretical and empirical claims, an approach which is particularly effective. Let there be no doubt: this is a must-read for every student of American political development, as well as for anyone seeking to understand the origins of the modern American state. Yet precisely because it focuses on a particular period in partisan history-a period in which the rudiments of the modern regulatory state also happened to be forged-James' work leaves some critical questions unanswered. For example, are party leaders always successful in driving their parties toward electorally rational choices on regulatory matters? Given the inherent tension between appealing to marginal voters and states and adhering to cherished party principles, this seems highly unlikely. But if this is the case, what distinguishes success from failure? Future work in this vein should investigate the conditions under which party leaders can induce significant departures from their parties' traditional regulatory commitments: this research will require case studies both of successful and of failed efforts. It would also be interesting to see how changes in the intensity of competition between parties would affect party leaders' political strategies and the dynamics of regulatory choice. What do patterns of regulatory choice look like during periods in which the parties are more evenly matched? Finally, while James convincingly demonstrates that electoral considerations were central to Democrats' embrace of the regulatory state, he provides less evidence for his contention that the character of the state would have been considerably different had Democrats not accepted Mugwumpish or Progressive commitments.

Although its title, The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877{1962, suggests a relatively narrow focus, Alan Ware's new book actually embarks on a sweeping attack on the electoral realignment literature, raising critical questions both about its theoretical commitments and empirical findings. In this sense, Ware's work builds on some of the themes articulated in David Mayhew's influential work (Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre, Yale University Press 2002); but Ware's work seeks to go further, offering an alternative model for understanding American electoral history since the Reconstruction era. Ware's effort to recast the realignment model, coupled with his nuanced analysis of Walter Dean Burnham's electoral data, makes The Democratic Party Heads North an important book.

The realignment genre was founded in a behavioral understanding of American politics. Party fortunes-and, hence, the broad thrust of public policy-could be explained primarily by the balance of partisanship in the electorate: whichever party had the most identifiers would, all things equal, tend to win elections, and thereby set the terms of public policy. Within each "alignment," one party's pool of voters was simply larger than the other's, leaving the other party at a profound disadvantage until the next crisis came along to upset the old dominant coalition and "realign" voters' partisan identities. In Ware's view, this behavioral view of party politics is fundamentally misleading-and to interrogate it, he engages in an intensive case study of party competition between the 1880s and the 1960s. Ware's core theoretical argument is that, contrary to the claims of the realignment genre, political parties' electoral fortunes from the 1880s-1960s were not determined primarily by the size of each party's constituency (that is, by the number of its identifiers); rather, they are shaped by political and social developments which influence the parties' relative capacities to manage the diverse constituencies that might be forged into congressional and presidential majorities. Since, as Ware contends, aggregation of diverse interests is the key to electoral victory, parties as organizations, coalitions, and seats of political leadership must take center stage in an analysis of electoral dynamics. Party identification in the electorate is much less important to electoral history than is traditionally asserted.

Ware's model is highly sensitive to historical context and singular events, and its intricacies are difficult to elaborate adequately in a short review. Roughly, though, Ware contends that broad socioeconomic trends, such as immigration patterns and economic cycles, interact with institutional developments within the party and the leadership strategies of party elites to shape a party's capacity to forge a majority coalition. Even if a party's various constituencies are sufficiently large that, if aggregated, they could form a majority, the interaction of these factors can complicate-and even prevent-their successful aggregation under the party banner come election time. Divisions between intraparty factions created by new social and economic issues, a dearth of suitable presidential candidates, and the inattentiveness of party leaders to the demands of coalitional maintenance, all can chronically weaken a party's performance at the national (especially presidential) level, where aggregation of diverse interests is most difficult, thereby creating the illusion that the party's coalition is too small to win even if the party is quite competitive in subnational politics, where aggregating interests is easier.

In Ware's view, Democrats were habitually in the minority between the 1880s and 1932 primarily because they recurrently faced greater challenges in aggregating their constituencies' preferences at the national level. As Ware's careful analysis of aggregate voting data suggests, Democrats were often quite competitive electorally with Republicans at the subnational level throughout this period, but were deeply disadvantaged in national politics. In the 1880s and 1890s, Democrats' strength was refracted by a host of institutional obstacles, including the Electoral College, partisan gerrymandering, and local party factionalization. After 1896, they were hurt by a dearth of suitable national political leaders, which put the party into the hands of the unelectable "radical" William Jennings Bryan for much of the period between 1900 and 1912, as well as by the emergence of new cultural issues that divided the party's constituencies. When Democrats were given the chance to consolidate a majority after the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson squandered it. Throughout the period under study, Democrats faced great difficulties in reconciling the interests of Southern Bourbons and Western Populists and Progressives. A changed political, social, and electoral environment after 1932 gave Democrats a slight edge outside the South, but Republicans continued to vigorously contest the North until the early 1960s.

The great strengths of Ware's analysis are his sensitive use of electoral data-which is deployed to effectively debunk some of the shibboleths of the realignment paradigm-and his attentiveness to historical complexity. In some ways, though, these strengths are also weaknesses. Ware's heavy reliance on electoral data to make his points is, to a degree, in tension with the thrust of his theoretical arguments, which privilege the politics of interest aggregation and the leadership of party elites. In reading the book, I was surprised that relatively little attention was given to tracing the actual historical efforts to party leaders and presidential candidates to aggregate diverse interests. In particular, some readers may not be persuaded by Ware's account of Wilson's failure to consolidate his coalition. While Ware's analysis carefully identifies the wide range of factors that may have contributed to Democrats' problems of interest aggregation, readers who value parsimony in explanation may find his analysis unsatisfying. A methodological issue at play in Ware's account is also worth debating. Ware reconstructs measures of the parties' electoral bases, and thus of reasonable party strategies, from his nuanced analysis of electoral data. As noted above, this analysis raises important questions about the conventional wisdom in American electoral studies. But if Ware's assessment of electoral data is superior to that of past political scientists, is it reasonable to believe that party leaders of yore possessed data of similar quality on which they could assess the condition of their coalitions and develop their political strategies?

Scholars will profit from reading these two books. Their contributions to our understanding of intrapartisan politics and its consequences for elections and regulatory choice will make them influential works in the field.

• Home
• Search Reviews
• About Political ReviewNet

Privacy Policy