Partisan Balance

Any time you read something David Mayhew has written, you end up learning something. His latest book, Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don't Kill the U.S. Constitutional System is no exception to that rule. Nevertheless, it's still a bit of a strange book because it's not entirely clear to me why he thinks his thesis is so reassuring.

The central claim of the book is that American political institutions aren't systematically biased against one political party or the other. Examining the Truman to Bush era, he shows that thanks to the "packing" of liberals into super-partisan urban districts, the median House district is about one percentage point less Democratic than the country as a whole. The Senate is a bit more GOP leaning, but only slightly so. He shows that Democratic and Republican presidents have had equal (and large) amounts of trouble getting congress to go along with their ideas. He shows that both the House and the Senate have played obstructionist roles at different times and in roughly equal measure. He reminds us that there have been times when the Senate was more liberal than the House as well as vice versa.

This is all good to know, and I learned a lot of fascinating political history along the way. But the natural interpretation seems to me to be that America's political parties are very good at adapting to institutional realities. That's interesting, but it doesn't carry much justificatory power. It seems to me that if we made it illegal for women to vote, the party system would adjust to the shock. But it would still be wrong, and would still have important consequences for people's lives. Presidents try not to put obviously doomed items on the agenda, and good for them. But that leaves open the question that important topics are being kept off the agenda.

Bottom line: Good book, but I wouldn't make this your first Mayhew if you haven't read any of his other books.