A reading of the American politics literature on apportionment and districting gives the impression that political battles over the drawing of electoral districts originated with the “reapportionment revolution” of the 1960s, and that the courts played little to no role in apportionment before then. Peter Argersinger's Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America shows that that impression is wrong—that state legislatures frequently redrew electoral district boundaries during the nineteenth century, that those decisions were often contentious, and that the state courts intervened as early as the 1890s. Through a series of meticulously researched narratives of Midwestern states in the late nineteenth century, the author documents a deeper, little-discussed history of a politically charged process that continues to shape American politics to this day.

Argersinger's analysis starts with the 1870s and 1880s, a period of Republican dominance in Midwestern politics and rampant manipulation of congressional and state legislative districts. While Republican leaders weighed multiple considerations in drawing districts—such as requests of powerful incumbents and local delegations—their main goal was to partition the popular vote in a way that would reliably elect large numbers of Republicans to office. Throughout this period, gerrymandering was widely viewed as a legitimate exercise of legislative authority.

That changed when electoral tides turned against Republicans starting in 1889, putting Democrats in charge of apportionment. Then, with gerrymandering working against them, Republicans challenged the constitutionality of Democratic gerrymanders in court—a court system that was, not coincidentally, dominated by Republican judges.

Argersinger shows that the ensuing legislative and legal debates were protracted and bitter, consuming large portions of state legislative sessions and featuring prominently in the platforms of the political parties. Democrats accused Republicans of hypocrisy, and Republicans accused Democrats of purposeful disfranchisement of Republican voters. The possible involvement of the courts injected tremendous uncertainty in the political environment. Would judges agree to hear the cases, and if so, how would they decide, and what would the consequences be? What was once predictable—that the party in power would craft electoral rules to its advantage—was now unknown. When several courts declared Democratic gerrymanders unconstitutional and sometimes threw out earlier Republican gerrymanders as well, the result was confusion, feuding, and instability.

The book traces the events of the 1890s in particular detail. Importantly, although the courts took the unprecedented step of intervening in apportionment, they left it to the state legislatures to draft new electoral maps that satisfied constitutional requirements. Some legislatures openly defied the courts' rulings and enacted equally objectionable new maps, only to be challenged again in court. Others devolved into chaos, as there was no clear reversion point: If the sitting legislature was elected by an unconstitutional system of districts, did it have authority to draw another map? If a new election was needed, how would that election be conducted, given the unconstitutionality of recent electoral maps? In Indiana, the legislature erupted in violence, and many voiced fears of anarchy. Across the region, state governments were consumed by conflict over the authority of the different branches of government, the legitimacy of past laws, and the appropriate path forward.

Some contemporaries anticipated that the courts' decisions would end the practice of gerrymandering, but as Argersinger explains, judicial intervention failed to stem the problem, for two main reasons. The first was the courts' disavowal of authority to compel state legislative action, which “had the effect of leaving a constitutional apportionment under the control of the very institution least interested in assuring it” (p. 278). Second, the state constitutions were “fatally limited” (p. 279): They required compact, contiguous districts of equal population but also required that electoral boundaries adhere to political boundaries, such as counties. With counties varying so greatly in population, it was impossible to craft a system of electoral districts without some degree of population inequality. The courts acknowledged as much in their decisions, effectively sanctioning some bending of the rules. In the book's final chapter, the author concludes (p. 280) that “America's political ideals, in short, could not effectively be achieved through its political institutions. In a partisan polity, constitutions did not guarantee, courts could not mandate, legislatures did not support, and political parties did not uphold equitable representation and popular political rights.”

Argersinger makes an important contribution simply by bringing attention to these understudied episodes in the history of American apportionment, but the book also speaks to broad themes in the political science literature. Scholars interested in the causes and effects of political institutions will find the book a fascinating illustration of how competition for political control and policymaking authority sparks fights over the institutions that shape those outcomes. Argersinger's conclusions about the involvement of the courts in apportionment battles, the multidimensional strategies of the judges, and the long-term policy consequences of a relatively weak judicial branch will interest scholars of the American courts. And scholars of American political development will be intrigued by Argersinger's suggestion that the early intervention of the courts may have entrenched an inequitable electoral system for nearly 70 years.

At times, I did wish for a clearer exposition of the theory. Argersinger diligently documents the complexity of reapportionment battles and the multiple considerations that shaped the decisions of key actors, but he does not explicitly distinguish between the variables most important to the form and outcome of apportionment battles and more peripheral factors. A clearer theoretical contribution would have made it easier to think about what the book's findings imply for apportionment and representation outside of the Midwest and in other time periods.

A more explicit theoretical framework might also have helped to answer an important question introduced but only partially answered in the book: Why, after a decade of intense partisan fighting over the electoral map, did apportionment cease to be a salient political issue in the early twentieth century? Argersinger does make a compelling case for the reason that the tumult quieted down in the short run: the Democratic split over free silver, the sheer dominance of Republicans in the Midwest following the realignment, fear of the instability that had followed apportionment litigation, and the demonstrated inability of the courts to impose a solution. But the electoral map was still biased at the turn of the century, and that bias worsened over time as underlying political conditions changed but institutions failed to adjust. One cannot help but wonder why the Democrats did not challenge the rules in the decades that followed, why the press suddenly stopped covering apportionment, and why politicians appeared to lose interest. With so much at stake in the drawing of districts, it is both fascinating and puzzling that this issue of institutional design fell off the agenda.

Naturally, however, there is only so much that one can cover in a single book, and one of the strengths of Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America is its potential to stimulate growth in the literature on the impact of apportionment and districting on policy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as on the dynamics behind the “silent gerrymander” of the first half of the twentieth century. By unveiling a critical and understudied segment of American political history, this book deserves a careful read by scholars of American politics and comparative politics, especially those with an interest in representation or the history of electoral institutions.