Byron E. Shafer & Regina L. Wagner's "The Long War over Party Structure"

Byron E. Shafer is Hawkins Chair of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Regina L. Wagner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Long War over Party Structure: Democratic Representation and Policy Responsiveness in American Politics, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford did not have the social sciences in mind, with their need to blend text and evidence at every point, when he suggested the Page 99 Thesis. Or perhaps he did, and he meant to alert readers that what is being conveyed in these books must be a compound of interpretation and evidence.

In that sense, it is pages 99 and 100 of The Long War over Party Structure that are his introductory sample. A reader who cuts into the story there meets the political ideologies of the ordinary American, not of scholars and theorists. With an eye on current politics, what stands out is the long-running presence of a strong streak of Populism. Once, this Populism was one of two fundamental strands in American politics. For a long time, it has instead been suppressed by political activists in both parties, but the data—not to mention current experience?— suggest that it never went away.

The argument about ideology is nested in a larger argument, keyed in the title of the book, about changes in the way political parties connect public preferences with the real activities of government. And this builds on a huge, data-driven, irony. Forty years of attempts to ‘open up’ politics by increasing the clout of issue activists have come at the expense of a general public that has a lot more to think about in its daily life than politics. A party system that once focused on delivering concrete rewards to partisans, from party officials drawn from local community organizations, has been successfully replaced by a party system focused on mobilizing intense, independent, issue activists, for whom rank and file citizens and their daily lives are in effect the enemy.

Learn more about The Long War over Party Structure at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue