David Ryden's edited volume, The U.S. Supreme Court and the Electoral Process, examines the fundamental rules surrounding some neglected and not so neglected areas of election law. The charge to the distinguished contributors is weighty given the issues and resurgence of interest in the questions surrounding democratic governance. Can or should the U.S. Supreme Court adopt and defend, on the grounds of neutrality and consistency, a theory of representation? How does the judiciary approach one of the most important arteries of representation? More specifically, what rules should govern how political parties struggle with the inevitable tension between majority representation and minority interest in such diverse areas as regulatory politics and campaign finance? What reforms, if any, can the Supreme Court either endorse or initiate given the immediately “suspect” character of an unelected body deciding the constitutional course of representational politics?

Yet the Supreme Court may be ill suited to deal with the incredibly complicated and innately political context of representation. Nancy Maveety provides a useful framework for analyzing the Rehnquist's Court's general approach to political representation. She ultimately describes the Court's treatment as atheoretical. Howard Scarrow's more focused and even more pessimistic account the of the Court's treatment of legislative districting reveals how the Court often veers far from the standard of neutrality and logic. A comparison of these two chapters highlights the challenges before the authors and the U.S. Supreme Court. Neither more general nor narrower investigations of representational rules can avoid the inherent value choices available to the judges at the level of the Supreme Court.

Anyone interested in election law, political parties, and democratic governance can learn much from this microanalytic work on the rules laid down in the American context. It is striking that the authors tackle these questions both with rugged scholarship and with an often-hidden eye toward how the different answers could play out in the new international political arena. Yet international readers, and even casual observers of the U.S. Supreme Court, should come with a rather broad knowledge of the Supreme Court's decisions on the U.S Constitution and political representation. It is a shame that books must have broad and intriguing titles because their flaws ultimately are noted in the lack of coverage of a particular area. Nonetheless, given the quality of the work contained in The U.S. Supreme Court and the Political Process and the events surrounding Bush v. Gore, 121 S.Ct, 525 (2000), readers should find this volume in a second edition very soon.

Donald Grier Stephenson's work on electoral politics is much different in its approach, theoretical focus, and method. Stephenson sets forth several macroanalytical propositions in Campaigns and the Court. As such, he examines each proposition with an historical method eschewing quantification and precision. He also employs a broader time frame and a very different focus beyond the institutional rules at the forefront of the Ryden volume. Stephenson forces us to integrate how environmental and broad social changes precipitate and interact with the complex character of the U.S. Supreme Court. More specifically, he examines the Supreme Court in the periods before and after so-called “critical” presidential elections. He seeks to test five propositions contained generally in the existing literature. First is the proposition that partisan involvement with the Court is more likely when the Court uses its power of judicial review to overturn rather than uphold the policy choices of the popularly elected branches. This proposition finds strong support in the historical record.

The second proposition is well-known: The Court will become embroiled in policy conflict with a new majority coalition following elections denoting major and long-term partisan change. Stephenson's third proposition relates to such major partisan shifts: The Court will begin within a decade to make policy more consistent with the new majority. This proposition does hinge on several nearly stochastic events such as turnover on the high bench. The fourth proposition focuses on how the Court's decisions can “clarify” or “define” the response of party leaders and their constitutional options on the issues surrounding major partisan change. Finally, when the Court becomes involved in the politics of the divisive issues surrounding major partisan change, there are attacks on the Court's legitimacy and its power of judicial review.

None of these propositions will be considered novel by careful readers of the work of Robert Dahl (1957), David Adamany (1973), Richard Funston (1975), William Lasser (1985), et al. Yet no single work in this literature attempts to test the validity of each proposition across such a long time frame, spanning from 1800 to the mid-1980s. With this book, Stephenson may well enter the ranks of constitutional historians such as Charles Fairman and Charles Warren. Rarely does one find such care and scholarship in addressing so many interesting and difficult questions.

Clearly, Stephenson has mastered the historical method and uses it to address generalizable propositions about the dynamics of the Supreme Court and important presidential elections. Similarly to those who use a strained theory to address important questions with precision and technical expertise, one walks away from the method utilized with serious reservations. Each conclusion is so qualified that no settled answer follows. While some may blame the method used, it is documented that other methods generate similar qualifications on these very questions. The reason is simple: Huge, macroanalytic questions often belie a single analytical strategy. Nonetheless, Donald Grier Stephenson's work stands at the forefront of a research tradition he warmly embraces.

The U.S. Supreme Court is dynamic in its rules and its place in American political history. Such trite offerings in no way take away from the lessons learned by Ryder's fine volume or Stephenson's masterful historical analysis. Yet one is reminded of Terri J. Peretti's In Defense of a Political Court (2000). The American judicial ideal of neutrality and consistency is perhaps nowhere more difficult to meet than when confronting the U.S. Supreme Court and the fundamental questions surrounding representation and democratic governance.