The American Congress may be the most studied political institution in the modern world. And institutional development is one of the most important themes in contemporary political science. In combination, we might expect that there would be many books describing and explaining the institutional development of the two chambers of the United States Congress. There are, however, very few such studies and even fewer that consider institutional change within a well-articulated theoretical framework. Fighting for the Speakership thus fills part of a very large void in congressional scholarship. Not only that, but Jeffery A. Jenkins and Charles Stewart, III, have given us a scholarly treatise that will be emulated and referenced for many decades to come.

The backbone of this splendid book is composed of narrative accounts and statistical analyses of contests for the speakership of the House of Representatives, from the First Congress in 1789 through the Seventieth Congress in 1927. Within their theoretical framework, these contests were the crucible within which political parties in the House developed the “organizational cartel” that the authors define as “a device through which the majority party asserts exclusive control over the speakership and other top offices in order to achieve three goals: [a] to control House patronage, [b] distribute authority among important factions of the majority party, and [c] influence the agenda-setting apparatus of the House” (p. xiii). Basically, an organizational cartel is a majority-party caucus that is able to enforce unity among its members in the election of a Speaker by credibly threatening to punish those who might otherwise defect from the party’s nominee. An organizational cartel, in turn, is the necessary but not sufficient condition for procedural and, often, substantive control of the legislative agenda (p. 304).

The centrality of the organizational cartel to the authors’ theoretical framework explains both the substantive emphasis on contests for the speakership (because they were the crucible within which members developed the institutional prerequisites for the organizational cartel) and the emphasis on the nineteenth century (because those institutional prerequisites were almost entirely effected before the turn of the century). From a rational-choice perspective, the binding party caucus not only “solved the instability problem in speakership elections” but also “effected a structure-induced equilibrium” that provided “an institutional solution” to “collective choice problems,” such as “instability on the House floor” that had often “spilled out … at the convening of a new Congress” (pp. 23, 153, 250).

At the risk of oversimplification, we might divide institutional theories into three broad categories. One views institutions as unique solutions to collective-action problems of one sort or another. From this perspective, the narrative describing institutional development reflects on the learning of political actors as they progressively discover and then implement that solution. Adopting an almost polar-opposite position, a second view assumes that there are multiple solutions to collective problems and, thus, many different arrangements of power and authority that can be embedded in stable institutions. Which one of these potential solutions is actually arrived at is then explained, in many of these interpretations, by critical conjunctures in which an institution is sent, often almost randomly, down a particular path. The third and last theoretical frame places much less stress on the formal features of institutions (such as bureaucratic routines, rules, and statutory authority) and, instead, emphasizes individual personalities and ideas. From this perspective, institutional arrangements and designs are primarily important in so far as they enable political action by their most active and influential members. In some treatments, institutions even become merely what agents make of them.

The authors clearly believe that the organizational cartel was an institutional solution to a collective-action problem, but it is not obvious, at least in my reading, that they would contend that it was a unique solution. The distinction is important because they do maintain that past speakership contests informed subsequent political decisions and strategies. If the organizational cartel is interpreted as a unique solution, then the question becomes how that solution was discovered. Put another way, how did members “learn” which characteristics that solution must have? If the organizational cartel was but one of several (perhaps many) possible institutional solutions, then institutional development would not be movement along a predetermined path; one way or another, members would reach (perhaps stumble upon) a solution and then have no reason to abandon it. The authors do say that “the history of how speakership elections developed was propelled forward by a desire to establish an organizational cartel in the House” (p. xiii). Later in the book, they add that “the organizational cartel was an aspiration, not a reality,” before the Civil War (p. 304). These passages suggest that members knew what an institutional solution would be from very early in the nineteenth century. However, because it took most of a century to develop the organizational cartel, these members either did not know how to reach that solution or could not effect it because other members prevented them from doing so.

The former suggests that members were engaged in “learning” how to politically effect a rational institutional solution that they already understood and recognized. From the authors’ perspective, that is a plausible explanation because constituencies played a confounding role in many of these speakership contests in that they prevented members from acting upon their “sincere preferences.” Thus, members learned in some sense how to manage constituency demands and, once they had done so, effected the organizational cartel. The latter explanation suggests that the creation of an organizational cartel was not the primary concern of many or most members, who simply cared about other things. Thus, the minority of members (often prominent leaders) who both recognized and wanted to create the binding caucus played an outsized role in the creation of the modern speakership because, for one thing, the organizational cartel would enhance their influence in the chamber.

With respect to the terms “equilibrium” and “equilibrium solution,” I will only note that these are metaphors that suggest that two or more things (such as supply and demand in a market) are in balance. Although these terms occur dozens of times in the text, it is never clear what those two or more things might be in the equilibrium brought about by the binding caucus. In my reading, I interpreted “equilibrium” to mean little more than that the organization cartel appeared to be empirically stable because there have been very few defections from the majority party caucus in speakership elections since the 1920s. However, as the authors note, such defections have been on the rise over the last decade. They explain these defections as merely “symbolic” and thus do not constitute a threat to the organizational cartel (pp. 318–19). However, if a speakership contest were held today, enough Republicans might very well defect from the majority party caucus so as to endanger the party nominee.

As political historians, we are pretty good at explaining the past just as the present is on the cusp of taking another direction (Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics, 1970; Nelson Polsby, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review, 1968). While this might be yet another instance, Fighting for the Speakership will still remain one of the most fully realized, imaginative, and theoretically rich institutional accounts in our discipline.