Majority-voting

A classic in its time, this book by two prominent Democrats attempted to warn the Democratic Party not to pander to "trendy" groups of voters, but instead to focus on the "unpoor, unblack and unyoung" (that is, the average American voter) in order to achieve success at the polls. Much has changed in this country in the intervening thirty-odd years, but its message is one that, actually, the Republicans have been heeding more nationally. That is why of the seven Presidents who have served since this book was written, only two were Democrats, and those two were both Southern governors and at least attempted to sound like moderates (one may have been a genuine moderate). The last Northern Democrat to occupy the White House was John F. Kennedy.

Especially in the middle-ages European courts

I am a strong proponent of proportional representation and I
bought this book along with Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
I read Powell's book first and was very excited in the beginning,
but as the book went on I found some of his arguments not
very compelling, and I ended up skimming very quickly
the second half of the book. I am an academic, but my
field is not political science, so perhaps this book would
be more interesting to someone in the field. So far, I find
Lijphart's book to be much more interesting.

The book does a good job of laying out how two models of democracy--majoritarian and proportional--deal with voters' intent and desires. While both political systems have their merits, this book shows how the proportional vision out-performs the majoritarian by better reflecting the populace's needs and better representation of the voter's wishes. This result may give pause to many Americans, who may believe that our majoritarian system is preferable to others, when, in fact, Proportional Representation may actually be the most democratic. One note of caution: the intended audience is clearly the Poly Sci community, so be ready for lots of tables, charts, averages and regressions.

...but maybe they should. Kevin Phillips' 1969 classic, The Emerging Republican Majority, remains the most concise and dependable guide to historical voting trends in the United States in the 20th century. The book itself is notorious for urging that Republicans pursue a "Southern strategy" and abandon the liberal establishmentarian constituencies in the northeast that had previously held sway over the party, but its real value is in the rich historical background Phillips provides. Phillips can be said to have been successful in spotting a realignment that was then very recent (first manifesting itself in 1964) and proclaiming its continuation well into the future. Other tectonic shifts in American politics have not proven so long-lasting. In many ways, the Eisenhower coalition of 1952 and 1956 seemed more formidable than the coalition Phillips describes, but it could not be sustained without the former General's personal appeal. More recently, one also recalls Arthur Schlesinger's 1992 prediction that Bill Clinton's election augured the beginning of a new 30-year cycle of liberal governance, a hope which would be dashed by the Republican takeover of Congress 24 months later.

Above all, what I learned from The Emerging Republican Majority is that most shifts in voting behavior from election to election really do have rational explanations rooted in policy and in the candidates' important personal traits. Those who have been able to anticipate these coming shifts have a distinct advantage in winning elections.

Phillips seeks to why certain voting blocs, say, ancestrally German counties in Wisconsin, or Irish Catholic neighborhoods in New York City show unusual Democratic strength in one election while other areas of the country turn in an unusually depressed Democratic vote when compared to four years earlier. What Phillips finds is that these shifts are no fluke. The Catholicism of Democrat Al Smith in 1928 (and of course, of John F. Kennedy in 1960) led to unprecedented Democratic majorities among Catholics. The electoral revolt of German counties in the Midwest against FDR in 1940 was a direct reaction to FDR's desire to contain Nazi aggression, and continued into the war election of 1944. As America moved Westward in the last century, people took their voting behaviors with them, and this is evident in how the Yankee-settled Pacific Northwest behaved compared to the largely Midwestern suburban tracts of Southern California. These sociological realities are readily apparent in election returns. With nearly 200 charts and maps, The Emerging Republican Majority is a book that's unusually full of such historically revealing facts.