How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change. By Nelson W. Polsby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 257p. $29.95.

A new work on Congress by one of the most prominent scholars of American government in the past half century is a major event. In this book, Nelson Polsby revisits the U.S. House, a subject on which he authored two major articles in the late 1960s (“The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62 [March 1968]: 144–68; and Nelson W. Polsby, Miriam Gallaher, and Barry S. Rundquist, “The Growth of the Seniority System in the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 63 [September 1969]: 707–807). Observing the contemporary House in this volume, Polsby finds a chamber transformed. The “permanent” Democratic majority has been broken, the “solidly” Democratic South now sends a Republican majority to the House, committee chairs are subordinate to the party leadership, and levels of party voting are at their highest since the 1890s.

The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.

The overriding theme of this very insightful work from distinguished presidential scholar Fred I. Greenstein is stated in the opening pages: “The United States is said to have a government of laws and institutions rather than individuals, but as these examples remind us, it is one in which the matter of who occupies the nation's highest office can have profound repercussions” (p. 2). Greenstein's analysis of presidential leadership styles from FDR to Clinton corroborates his theme by demonstrating the extent to which the aggrandizement of the presidency since the New Deal has left the American polity at the mercy of the skills and personalities of the holders of the office. As Greenstein himself points out (p. 3) parliamentary systems, with their more collective leadership, place more partisan and institutional constraints on the head of government. In contrast, the centrality of the presidency to the American system of government since the New Deal and the extent to which the institution is driven by the individual style of respective officeholders provide a recurrent and pervasive element of instability in American national government. Yet this very instability is also perhaps the office's most useful attribute. In a system characterized largely by gridlock it provides intermittent and necessary innovation and dynamism. The presidency's' greatest shortcoming, its highly protean nature, is also, ironically, its greatest value as a political institution.

The issue of ‘tactical voting’ aroused a great deal of interest during the 1987 United Kingdom general election campaign. This Note considers the nature and importance of tactical voting in Britain and makes an attempt to detect its presence empirically using electoral data.

In the study of contemporary American politics the phenomenon referred to as the “decline of party” has aroused considerable debate. Many writing on this subject maintain that American parties have been in a longterm and irreversible process of secular decline. Others hold that American parties have merely changed their role in the political system and although increasingly eliminated from presidential politics have developed considerably as national political organisations. This latter thesis has particular reference to the Republican party. The GOP has won four of the last five presidential elections, and has developed its national party organisation to a level of efficacy and sophistication unprecedented in American history.