The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics.

By Byron E. Shafer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 360p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This collection of 10 essays by Byron E. Shafer brings an unusual breadth of theoretical, historical, and comparative perspective to the interpretation of contemporary politics in the United States. The volume's most valuable contribution is the sustained treatment in several essays of the impact of “the two majorities” on American governance.

Shafer starts with the assumption that policy preferences in America are aligned along two broad issue dimensions, economic-welfare and cultural-national. A moderately liberal majority on economic matters coexists with a moderately conservative majority on cultural questions. Party loyalties among voters are more closely tied to economic than cultural issues, but Democratic activists tend to be liberal on both dimensions while Republican activists tend to be conservative on both. Given the nature of the two majorities, Democrats have the electoral advantage when the political context emphasizes economics, Republicans when the context emphasizes cultural values.

Before 1968, partisan politics had been organized around economic issues, and elections normally resulted in Democratic control of the national government. Cultural issues came to prominence in the 1960s, but they did not crowd economic issues off the political agenda. Instead, partisan conflict revolved around both dimensions. Divided government became the post-1968 norm: The party aligned with one issue majority controlled the presidency, and the other controlled Congress.

Several essays are especially effective in showing how political actors mediate the impact of the two majorities on national policymaking. The structure of the two majorities, coupled with the ideological preferences of party activists, makes it difficult for either party to find the electoral center in presidential politics, though both Democrats (the “New Democrats”) and Republicans (George W. Bush's “compassionate conservatism”) have tried. Once in office, a centrist president must contend with a congressional party that includes a large contingent of programmatic ideologues. Bill Clinton campaigned as a centrist in 1992, but his Democratic majority in Congress included a large portion of liberals who expected policy payoffs on cultural issues. Clinton's loss of control over the policy agenda was to cost his party dearly in the 1994 midterm election.

Clinton actually had become president much as an old Democrat would have. His 1992 campaign emphasized the economy and appealed to bedrock elements of the New Deal coalition. In 1994 Republicans successfully portrayed the Democrats as incompetent and too liberal, especially on cultural issues, and won a majority of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. The Republicans suffered their own reversal of fortune when they attempted to accomplish large budget cuts in the 1995 budget impasse. Clinton was able to style himself a defender of popular social insurance programs, playing to the Democrats' advantage on economic issues. Clinton's 1996 reelection was the ultimate result.

The two majorities also placed white southern Democrats in a key strategic position, at least until 1994. They were the only party faction that embodied the majority position on both economics and cultural issues. As a result, they were key to the formation of congressional majorities in many instances, including several during the first Bush and early Clinton administrations: the 1990 and 1993 budget processes, the Gulf War authorization, and passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Shafer covers this ground well, but the demise of the southern Democrats demands far more attention than he gives it. The 1994 southern congressional elections drastically altered the possible forms that both divided government and bipartisan coalitions could take.

Shafer also places the “era of divided government” in broader historical and comparative context. In one essay, he interprets long-term change in American party politics using Vilfredo Pareto's concept of the “circulation of elites.” In the late New Deal era, organized labor and white-collar Republicans defined partisan alternatives and kept them focused on economic issues. The 1960s saw the rise of the New Politics Democrats, who infused the party with an agenda of cultural liberalism. In this, Republican strategists saw an opportunity to bring cultural conservatives into the party. Their efforts reached fruition in the 1980s with the party's incorporation of another emerging elite, Evangelical Protestant leaders.

Two chapters compare American postwar partisan eras to those of other G-7 countries. The two issue dimensions, economic and cultural-national, constitute the substance of politics in all these nations, and in all of them the cultural dimension emerged to be important after a period in which politics had been organized around economic issues. In several of the countries, the arrival of the newer issues played a key role in at least one transition to a new political era. However, the timing of these transitions and the nature of the political orders they produced were conditioned by different social and constitutional structures and different historical sequences. A common issue stimulus thus produced a wide variety of political orders: divided government (U.S.), Thatcherism (Britain), cohabitation (France), and the alternation of government (always in coalition with the Free Democrats) in pre-unification Germany.

Some of the essays contribute little to the elaboration of the two-majorities model, but they are good representatives of Shafer's self-consciously interpretive and historical approach. “Reform in the American Experience” makes a convincing case for the persistence of “reform” as an ideological imperative throughout American history, although Shafer's conclusion that reform movements necessarily challenge from within the majority party is based on a misinterpretation of the progressive movement as a strictly Republican phenomenon (p. 200). The final chapter views American exceptionalism as the coexistence of four values that infuse all social institutions over the sweep of American history: populism, individualism, democratization, and market-making. In other cultural contexts these might be viewed as pairs of opposites, but in American culture they reinforce one another in their elaboration. Shafer thus makes American exceptionalism a tractable notion for comparative analysis.

In sum, the outlines of a compelling model of contemporary American politics are clearly visible in a number of these essays. Further, all the essays in The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics fulfill Shafer's aspiration for them: an interpretive political science that is grounded in history, comparison, and theory, and one that retains the language of politics as it is practiced.