Vol. 21 No. 6 (June, 2011) pp.317-322
THE END OF
INEQUALITY: ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS, by
Stephen Ansolabehere and James N. Snyder.
Reviewed by Christopher Malone, Department of Political
Science,
In his widely acclaimed 1991 book HOLLOW HOPE, Gerald
Rosenberg made the persuasive argument that the Supreme Court of the
THE END OF INEQUALITY focuses on the “quiet revolution”
which occurred in the four decades after the landmark BAKER v. CARR decision of
1962. According to Ansolabehere and Snyder, BAKER v. CARR presents the political
scientist with the closest thing to a “natural experiment” (pp.13-18) one could
find in the political world. For the first five decades of the twentieth
century, most state legislative districts across the country remained
apportioned [*318] in accordance with the precepts, population and power
structure of a rural/agrarian society. By the 1960s, however, the
Have the equal rights announced in BAKER v. CARR and its progeny led to equitable outcomes? The authors write:
Our interest arose out of a
desire to understand some of the most fundamental questions about democracy:
what is the value of the vote? What does truly democratic representation
achieve? Does it equalize the voice and power of the many interests in society,
or do wealth, social standing, and concentration of interests squelch those who
lack such resources? (p.14).
In brief, the answer for Ansolabehere and Snyder is an unequivocal yes: “the effects of reapportionment [in the wake of BAKER v. CARR] on these different aspects of politics all point to a singular conclusion: equal votes mean equal power. The equalization of representation led directly to an equalization of the distribution of public expenditures – who got what” (p.15).
In its form and method, THE END OF INEQUALITY is the best
of what a political scientist has to offer the worlds of social science,
politics and government. The work is both qualitative and quantitative in
nature. The authors present us with a clear and concise hypothesis that is to be
tested: the equal distribution of votes between the electorate and for the
elected in a democratic society lead to equitable outcomes. They present the
reader with a historical context to BAKER v. CARR and an in-depth narrative of
how the
After having shown that reapportionment in the wake of BAKER v. CARR had brought about a political revolution unseen in any modern democracy, the authors turn their attention in the penultimate chapter to the ostensible maladies of the current reapportionment system: party gerrymandering, racial districting and incumbent protection. While the reapportionment regime post-Baker may not be perfect, Ansolebehere and Snyder [*319] find that gerrymandering for political or racial purposes has less of an impact than one would think. They conclude in Chapter 11:
The distribution of the
vote across legislative districts is clearly uni-modal. Most of the districts
are near the center of the distribution. And the frequency of districts tails
off as one moves away from the political center. To put matters bluntly, there
is absolutely no trace of the bi-partisan cartel. Rather, the distribution of
the normal party vote in the legislative districts seems consistent with the
notion that the parties can exert relatively little influence over the contours
of legislative districts. They have some influence on the margin, but,
consistent with our earlier findings on partisan bias, state legislative
districts do not seem to reflect a strong partisan tilt (p.270).
And yet, the reelection rate for incumbents across most of the country is over 90%. If political or racial redistricting, on the one hand, or partisan collusion on the other, are not the causes for such high re-election rates, what explains it? According to Ansolebehere and Snyder, it is incumbency – not districting (p.271). As proof, the authors show that in the years immediately following redistricting (usually two years following the decennial census), incumbency departures have accelerated (p.265). In the US House of Representatives, for example, incumbency rates dip as low as 65 percent in redistricting years, versus 80-90 percent in normal years. “Redistricting acts as one of the few forces in American politics today that turns incumbents out of office” (p.265).
Given the amount of data brought to bear on the arguments
that Ansolebehere and Snyder present in THE END OF INEQUALITY, the conclusion
that ending malapportionment had an equalizing effect on American democracy is
indeed convincing. Yet, clearly equal redistricting cannot explain everything
when it comes to “the end” of inequality or the transformation of race politics
in the
Further, it is quite possible that the authors overreach when it comes to their conclusions on how redistricting affected the partisan and ideological divide in parts of the country. Ansolabehere and Snyder, for example, contend that redistricting moved the South to the right ideologically and toward the Republican Party politically because more suburban districts (which were ideologically more [*320] conservative than both rural and urban areas of the South) were created: “These new districts would add a conservative economic voice to southern state politics that had been absent” (p.224). As a consequence, the South became “more conservative and more Republican” (p.234), and reapportionment “created a pool of Republican politicians seeking to challenge the Democratic establishment” (p.232).
As proof, they present data compiled from the American National Election Study of 1964 and 1968 that are placed on a scale of 1 to 100. For the South, they find that in general ideology urban areas score a 52 (out of 100, with 100 being most liberal, 0 being most conservative), while suburban areas score a 39 and rural areas 49. On Civil Rights, the urban score was 52, while the suburban score dropped to 40 and the rural score to 32. Yet on partisan identification score, all three regions were over 50 (100 being Democratic, 0 being Republican): 62 for urban, 59 for suburban, 53 for rural (222).
The authors back these findings with other data compiled by the Comparative State Elections Project from 1968 (p.226). Again, they find that the South’s general ideology remained moderate to conservative (ranging 30 to 52 on the scale conservative/liberal scale) while the entire region leaned moderately to solidly Democratic (ranging 46 to 63 regionally on the Republican/Democrat scale).
From this data, it is simply not enough to come to the conclusion that it was redistricting which began moving the South in a more conservative, more Republican direction. For one, 1968 as the cutoff date does not give us enough data to work with. While 5 deep South states voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, 1968 was the date at which the South was beginning to trend Republican at the state and congressional level. We would need to see data that spanned several decades in order to arrive at a more informed conclusion. If we looked at other avenues of thought, however, one could well make the case that the cause of the swing to the Republican Party in the South was not reapportionment per se, but the issue of race (Malone 2008, chapter 6).
Consider this: On the evening of July 2nd, 1964, the night he had signed the Civil Rights Act in to law, President Lyndon Johnson sat on the bed in his quarters at the White House with several newspapers spread about him. Johnson’s press secretary Bill Moyers walked in and, sensing the president’s glum mood, asked why his signature on the most important piece of legislation since Reconstruction was not cause for celebration. Johnson replied, “Because Bill, I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come” (The story is recounted in Dallek 1998, p.120 ).
In the short term, Johnson’s fears were unfounded. He
coasted to victory that fall, garnering over 61% of the popular vote and racking
up 90% of the Electoral College total. But with his uncanny nose for politics,
Johnson saw the writing on the wall: signing the Civil Rights Act would most
certainly demolish the southern (white) base of his Democratic Party. In the
fall of 1964, Johnson lost just six states – Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia, South Carolina, and [*321] Barry Goldwater’s home state of Arizona. But
the speed with which parts of the South turned on Johnson and the Democrats is
telling and foreshadowed things to come in the decades since. In
In 1968, after Johnson was chased out of the presidential
race by his failures in
When the 89th Congress convened in January 1965, the
Democratic Party held veto-proof majorities in both houses: 295-140 in the
House, 68-32 in the Senate. Going into the elections in the fall of 1964, the
Democratic Party held nearly 90% of the southern seats in the House and over 95%
of the southern seats in the Senate. Yet, by the time the 93th Congress convened
in the winter of 1973, the Republican Party had captured 30% of the southern
seats in both House and Senate (Bartley and Graham 1975, at 190).
And by the time the 109th Congress convened – the same Congress which
passed the Voting Rights Reauthorization Act of 2006 – the partisan
transformation of the South had more or less been completed. In the sixteen
southern states from
Given these trends and realities, it is hard to believe that the sweeping partisan changes in the South from the mid 1960s on were due more to [*322] reapportionment than to the issue of race. Perhaps the two worked hand-in-hand; but the reality is that large parts of the South (and primarily white parts at that) trended Republican only after the end of Jim Crow in the mid 1960s. Further, one could make the argument that, as the center of gravity of the Republican Party migrated further South over the ensuing decades, the moderate northeastern, “Rockefeller Republican” became a rare species. In other words, it is quite feasible that race transformed the partisan identification of the South first, and then subsequently the North – not reapportionment.
One way to get at such a hypothesis would be to compare the ideological and partisan leanings of individuals from the 1990s or the 2000s to the data that Ansolebehere and Snyder present from the 1960s. If the South and Northeast, for example, remained relatively static in terms of general ideology but had significant disparities in partisan identification when the two periods are compared, that would tend to support the conclusion that the reapportionment “revolution” the authors point toward was probably superseded by a “racial revolution.”
These points do not detract from the importance of this
work. Discussions and debates such as these are precisely what a successful book
should foster. When it comes to the theoretical basis of democracy, to the role
and power of the
REFERENCES:
Bartley, Numan V. , and Hugh D. Graham. 1975. SOUTHERN
POLITICS AND THE SECOND RECONSTRUCTION.
Dallek, Robert. 1998. FLAWED GIANT: LYNDON JOHNSON AND HIS
TIMES.
Leip, Dave. ATLAS OF
Malone, Christopher. 2008.
BETWEEN FREEDOM AND BONDAGE: RACE, PARTY AND VOTING RIGHTS IN THE ANTEBELLUM
NORTH.
Rosenberg, Gerald. 1991.
HOLLOW
HOPE: CAN THE COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE?
Rosenberg, Gerald. 2008.
HOLLOW HOPE: CAN THE COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE? (2nd ed).
CASE REFERENCES:
BAKER v. CARR, 369
BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347
ROE v. WADE, 410
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© Copyright 2011 by the author, Christopher Malone.