Brookings Institution

Abstract

on governing well. The Politics of Representation suffers occasionally from the unevenness to which books of multiple authorship are vulnerable and from imprecise or questionable phrases, e.g., "the average Democrat" (p. 17); "the small number of McCarthyites at the 1968 convention" (p. 39); "the establishment politicians" (p. 46); and "people engaged in foreign trade" (p. 97). Nonetheless, the authors' data and the implications that they draw represent a solid contribution to the literature on political parties. The controversial 1972 delegate-selection rules are evaluated differently in the two books. Stewart says that the rules alienated many party leaders (some of whom lost delegate races because they backed the wrong candidate and hence could not attend the convention because of the ban on ex-officio delegates) and "casual Democrats" (nonactivist Democratic voters). For party unity , Stewart favors "a firm commitment to openness and fairness" but an end to "artificial" demographic criteria in delegate selection (p. 162). The Dartmouth group contends, however, that "the proposition that the so-called quota system was responsible for the radicalization of the convention" is used "to discredit spokesmen for the new constituencies" and "signal the old constituencies in the party-labor, blue-collar factions ... that they are returning to positions of leadership within the party" (pp. 35-36). They add: "Conservative Democrats say the quota system must be abolished; yet they want quotas for senior party leaders. The issue, we think, has never been the presence or absence of quotas; rather, it has been which groups should receive their protection, how decentralized the system should be, and, finally, how formally the requirement should be stated" (p. 37). The debate, it seems, goes on. The subtitle of this book is more descriptive than the title. James Sundquist has organized a valuable volume around the single issue of realignment in the Amer-ican party system over the past 120 years and into the near future. The book's plan falls roughly into three parts. The first three chapters cover the basic concept of realignment, some hypotheses about its occurrence, and five "hypothetical scenarios" for a party system impelled toward a possible realignment. The central middle section of the book describes and analyzes three realignments in American party history: those of the 1850s, the 189os, and the 1930s. The final chapters contain amplified conclusions about the process of realignment (with sixteen explanatory propositions) and discus