The Current Crisis in American Politics [Book Review]

Conventional political historians tell colorful stories of particular politicians or election campaigns or analyze the appeals of what they claim are the underlying ideologies of groups or of eras. Basing their accounts on the impressions of interested observers as recorded in letters and newspapers, they usually shun open and self-conscious theorizing and straightforward, falsifiable conclusions, and they pay scant attention to election returns, legislative roll calls, and other quantifiable data. Social scientific political historians, on the other hand, specify their assumptions and models, focus more on countable than on "lettristic" evidence, examine electoral systems or strings of elections, and aim to generalize. For traditionalists, questions about trends in voting turnout simply do not arise. The publication of these two books demonstrates both how much the newer approach has changed the research agenda of political history and how important questions of turnout have become. Yet reflection on their analysis suggests that the abandonment of the focus on the particulars of single elections and candidates may not be a wholly unmixed blessing for political history