The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877-1962 (review)

Ware has written an ambiguous book that seeks to revise the conventional wisdom about the competitiveness of American political parties from Reconstruction to the 1960s. Taking his cue from Mayhew's misgivings about the veracity of party-systems theory and his own prior research, Ware examines change and continuity in party electoral outcomes from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.¹ He argues that critical election theory has overdetermined the reordering of partisan coalitions, especially following the election of 1896. Continuity more than abrupt and sharp alterations in partisan competitiveness characterizes the eight decades after 1877.

The key to this story lies with the Democratic party, the constituent base of which was anchored in the South for most of the period reviewed. Not until the post–World War II era did the Democrats gain a viable foothold in northern states. From 1877 to 1889, Democrats managed to achieve a fragile competitiveness with Republicans nationally by establishing a toehold in five northern states. Following a period of ineffectiveness from 1896 to 1910, about which the author has little to say, Democrats regained competitiveness after 1912, when the party began to attract more votes in the nation's big cities. Whereas Woodrow Wilson failed to build a lasting national base for his party, Ware argues that Democratic party leaders had reassembled a competitive coalition that would have given Herbert Hoover and the Republicans a run for their money in 1932, even without the severity of the Great Depression. Yet Democratic successes under Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not destroy the Republican party, which remained competitive in most northern states, spearheaded by the emergence of the party's moderate wing. By mid-century the Republicans also benefited from fissures along racial lines among the Democrats.

By necessity, given its panoramic coverage, Ware's book is largely synthesis. It is also partly theoretical and leavened with analysis of election outcomes, measured with state-level data, supplemented with some returns for urban congressional elections. The work can be seen as an extended essay that questions orthodox understandings about "critical elections." Ware hypothesizes that parties are not passive vessels shaped by the hands of their constituents but entities with a destiny largely in the control of their leaders, who seek to build successful electoral coalitions. When parties lacked viable leaders, as in the instance of the Democrats (1896–1910), they suffered. To the author's credit, he is sensitive to the federal factor in the management of partisan competitiveness. But Ware did not directly examine how party leaders assessed the political terrain or tried to capture votes. Rather, he deduced strategic calculations largely from the analysis of electoral outcomes, and, especially, the geographical patterns in partisan strength.

Ware surveys the American polity from the perspective of a scholar working within the American political development school. His work is synthetic, conjectural, filled with ex-cathedra and counterfactual observations, and organized topically within chronologically framed chapters. He ignores scores of historians who have reconstructed patterns of voter and legislator behavior and party organization from the Civil War era to the Great Society. Neglecting this rich literature undermines the effectiveness of The Democratic Party Heads North as a synthesis of partisan history. Mining this lode of scholarship could have broadened the author's analysis of coalitions and "coalition-building."

Ware conceives of coalitions largely in a national sense, that is, as states that party leaders aggregated into winning collections of electoral votes in presidential elections. An alternative reading of coalitions would have focused on distinct voter groups, as well as organized and unorganized interests. Analysis of partisan victories at the state level cannot penetrate deeply into this behavioral foundation of American party politics. Ware's mismatch of evidence with research objective calls into question much of his extensive data presentation. This analytic weakness, coupled with the skewed references to the secondary literature, and an argumentative format, undermines the work's success as a reinterpretation of...