Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970 (review)

Harvey's book asks an important question, poses a thoughtful and coherent answer, and provides a broad framework that can be used to investigate analogous cases. Those interested in relationships among institutions, political actors, and policy outcomes, as well as those interested in new approaches to historical research, will find it both valuable and engaging. Harvey combines theoretical and empirical tools from economics, political science, and history in a well-written and forcefully argued book exploring the rise and fall of the policy influence of women's organizations. Using a rational-choice framework, she argues that most eligible voters desire group acceptance: Their vote is based upon cues received during an election campaign from others whose opinions matter to them. A policy-seeking interest group can use this desire for solidary (social group) benefits to mobilize voters. To leverage collective votes into policy influence, an organization must: (1) coordinate individually insignificant votes into powerful voting blocs, (2) seek specific policy concessions in return for votes, and (3) convince legislators that it is capable of delivering or withholding the group's votes.

Within this framework, Harvey re-examines why the increasing importance of women's votes in the post-suffrage years corresponded to a decline in the political influence of women's organizations from the mid-1920s until 1970. She suggests that women's exclusion from suffrage prior to 1920 created incentives for reform-seeking women's leaders to focus exclusively on suffrage as a first step to achieve other policy benefits for women. When women won the right to vote, these leaders required time to adapt their organizations to pursue a broader legislative agenda through electoral politics. Meanwhile, political parties were actively mobilizing women in partisan interests. At a distinct organizational disadvantage, and without a credible threat of electoral retaliation, women's organizations lacked policy leverage until the parties declined and the threat of electoral reprisal by women's organizations grew after 1968.

Harvey uses a methodology known as "process tracing." She states her primary causal hypothesis and uses deductive logic to develop several subsidiary hypotheses, creating a historical chain of causation. She tests each subsidiary hypothesis empirically, repeating the same procedure for alternative hypotheses offered by other scholars. Harvey's work is accessible and persuasive, even for those unfamiliar (or uncomfortable) with a rational-choice approach to political behavior. Her argument is strengthened by the wide range of data that she employs to test her hypotheses. Her study draws upon a variety of documentary sources (presidential papers, newspaper articles, convention transcripts, minutes from the National League of Women Voters' meetings, and newsletters from several suffrage and women's organizations), supplemented by aggregate and survey data, including women's partisan registration data. She uses this material to support the subsidiary hypotheses that comprise her own causal story and undermine previous attempts to explain the fluctuation of women's political leverage. Her command of the relevant literature allows her to build upon previous research, while avoiding many of the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of previous studies.

Despite her thorough, carefully presented and well-supported argument, Harvey's work will undoubtedly find many critics. Many scholars will object to her portrait of purely office-seeking elites and voters singularly concerned with social acceptance. Ideology, group consciousness, and policy priorities may well play a greater role in elite behavior than Harvey suggests. Harvey's de-emphasis on the roles of political ideology issue voting, and civic duty in mass voting behavior is also questionable. Harvey acknowledges that her work is unable to account for compelling arguments that women (or other groups) are distinct in ways that do not relate to the effects of their treatment by institutional rules. Yet her focus on the lasting consequences of institutional opportunities and constraints is a much-needed corrective to work that posits ideology alone as an adequate explanation for political outcomes.

Harvey's book will certainly inspire...