This book appeared in 2016, before President Donald Trump was elected. It sums up, with a massive array of research findings, much of what we know now about the officeholders, structures, and voters of the Republican and Democratic Parties. It is an outstanding book that deserves to be widely discussed by colleagues and featured in forums such as Perspectives on Politics.

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins do not posit an abstract or technical concept of what a political party is—say, this is a horse or that is a business firm—and then describe the nation’s great parties as evidence of the type of thing indicated by that appellation. Specifically, theirs is not the path followed by, for example, Kathleen Bawn, et al., “A Theory of Political Parties,” Perspectives on Politics, 10(3), 2013. More generally, they do not, like Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), approach parties as analogous entities rationally seeking support from relatively uncommitted voters who inhabit the middle of a political spectrum. Furthermore, to the extent that that spectrum is conceived of as having a liberal Left and a conservative Right, they do not ask, as does Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), why, psychologically speaking, some candidates and voters tend naturally to be on one side or the other.

Instead, Grossmann and Hopkins treat the Republican and Democratic Parties as two clashing institutions that evolved in concrete historical circumstances stretching at least from the 1930s to the Obama era, that admire different principles and public policies, and that do not much resemble each other in rhetoric, membership, structure, or practice. Thus, they regard each party as an entity whose motivations and behavior belong, for the most part, to it alone. Therefore, one is an “ideological movement” and the other is a “group coalition” (pp. 70–128).

To confirm this proposition, Asymmetric Politics shows that Republican candidates address voters mainly in ideological terms about traditional values, “free” markets, and patriotic support for American exceptionalism. Then it describes how Republican voters respond to those terms. Afterwards, it shows that Democratic candidates address voters mainly about government programs that now serve or will eventually serve specific group interests. Then it describes how Democratic voters, who mostly belong to such groups, respond to that talk.

Of course, both parties aspire to win elections for the benefit of their candidates and constituents. Nevertheless, the authors show how, as an expression of their asymmetry, to that end Republicans have one set of structures while Democrats have another. Thus, Republicans tend to be strong in organizations based on business, religion, and patriotism, while Democrats tend to be strong in universities, in big cities, among feminists, in labor unions, and in minority communities.

Furthermore, to create and disseminate information that will help them win elections, Republicans, promoting what they regard as true principles, rely mainly on media and research institutions fashioned and funded consciously to perform that function. At the same time, Democrats, promoting what they assume to be incontrovertible evidence, similarly maintain public-policy institutes and think tanks but also find considerable support in professional journalism and scientific research. Whereupon spokespeople for the roughly “ideological” and the approximately “empirical” worldviews entertained respectively by the two parties often talk past, rather than to, each other.

In short, the book does not strive for theoretical elegance but for probative thoroughness. Consequently, Grossmann and Hopkins cite dozens of political scientists, from Robert Lane, Nelson Polsby, and Theodore Lowi to Larry Bartels, Morris Fiorina, and Daniel Galvin; borrow from other disciplines, such as history, sociology, and communications; and vigorously project to readers the facts of their case. The result is an outstanding piece of political science research, synthesis, and analysis, whose authors lay out findings about the differing virtues and shortcomings of both parties so that this information will be available to ordinary citizens, activists, and the nation as a whole.

What, then, comes next for us as scholars? Let us agree that, roughly speaking, Asymmetric Politics demonstrates that Republicans and Democrats are, in some interesting respects, different institutions rather than two versions of the same thing. In that case, we might consider what the authors do not, which is that “ideologies,” which they describe as “broad systems of ideas about the role of government” (p. 14), are in important ways promoted by “stories.” For example (pp. 70–90), in their ideology, Republicans embrace 1) cultural conservatism embodied in “Judeo-Christian religiosity,” 2) libertarianism and neoliberal visions of laissez-faire economics, and 3) patriotic support for America as a world power. And tales certainly buttress all of these articles of faith.

Now, a rose is a rose by any name. But sometimes using a second name—in this case “stories”—can highlight implications not evoked by the first. Therefore, to consider Republicans and Democrats as being for or against not just “ideology” but also ideological “stories,” large or small, powerful or weak, emotional or logical, long run or short term, may help us to understand some of their partisan and structural differences.

So there is a first challenge. Of course, scholars who aspire to precision may be uncomfortable investigating the role of stories. It is difficult to define exactly what stories are; it is difficult to see where they begin and end; and it is difficult to measure their impact on personal and collective events. Nevertheless, political ideologies really do involve stories and storytelling; thus, their importance to public life is highlighted in, for example, Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (2003), Frederick Mayer, Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action (2014), and David Ricci, Politics Without Stories: The Liberal Predicament (2016).

A second challenge could more directly affect our core mission of teaching about democracy and good citizenship. On this score, we should note that Grossman and Hopkins assume mainly a consumer-sovereignty model of American voting behavior. In other words, they regard both parties as catering to what their respective voters—from Tea Partiers to union households—want. By definition, that assumption is usually valid for American elections.

Nevertheless, especially in the light of Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), and as John Kennneth Galbraith did classically in The Affluent Society (1958), it is important to ask where people’s preferences come from. As economists say, are they endogenous or exogenous? Or, in political terms, are they democratic or oligarchic?

Here, we can add to what Grossmann and Hopkins describe by exploring how elites press to implant voter affinities favorable to special interests, rather than leave electoral outcomes to be determined by what citizens spontaneously desire. So far, scholarship on this matter is divided. Thus, some writers (such as Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy, 2015, and Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, 2017) have suggested that ambitious conservatives use money to promote plutocratic policies, such as tax cuts for the rich. At the same time, some other writers (such as Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, 2007, and Charles Kesler, I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, 2012) insist that ambitious liberals promote government programs, such as Obamacare, as instruments for persuading voters to think Democratic and support that party.

Of course, that large challenges lie ahead in the study of American political parties does not in the least detract from the excellence of Asymmetric Politics. On the contrary, Grossmann and Hopkins have persuasively made the case that, in important respects, Republicans and Democrats, when in public life, belong to different species of the same genus. Now that that fact is established, we should confront it squarely and constructively.