Erik Engstrom and Samuel Kernell's study is rooted in a question that has long occupied students of American political parties and elections: How and why did very small shifts in the popular presidential vote produce very large changes in partisan control of political power across the board in the United States of the 1840s–90s? In other words, why did down-ballot elections—and even U.S. Senate contests that were not directly decided by voters—so closely and so strongly follow even the smallest shift in the national popular vote for president?

This overarching question becomes even more compelling when one considers the highly regional nature of nineteenth-century American society and politics, the abovementioned election of U.S. senators by state legislatures rather than voters, the highly limited communications and transportation networks of the time, the relatively narrow scope and agendas of the federal government during most of the nineteenth century, and the fact that most presidential candidates of the period waged very little in the way of election campaigns. Indeed, most remained relatively silent and out of sight in the run-up to Election Day, with only a very few candidates (always eventual losers) taking aggressively to the hustings in an attempt to win votes. Put simply, there are many more reasons to expect weak presidential coattails than the strong coattail effect one finds after universal, white male suffrage in nineteenth-century American presidential elections.

Scholars who work in this area generally agree that the parameters of the answer(s) to this puzzle are to be found in the strength of America political parties during this period. It was the golden age of parties, an era in which they dominated American politics in all facets and at all levels. Torchlight parades of average-Joe partisans, sometimes in uniform, and crowds in the thousands of these same partisans listening attentively to partisan speakers were the norm (Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics, 1986). But what explains these strong parties? The most common answer—produced by decades of research—is that ethnoreligious conflict and loyalties intensely and deeply divided the American electorate and that the major political parties of the time—first the Democrats and the Whigs and later the Democrats and the Republicans—represented these divisions and loyalties in partisan politics. Engstrom and Kernell are deeply skeptical of this conventional wisdom, but they do not pursue this skepticism with empirical analysis. Instead, they train their keen analytical powers on two claims that grew out of the ethnoreligious nature of nineteenth-century American politics. First, it is commonly asserted that parties' intense ethnic and religious appeals to the highly engaged voters in their respective bases drove the extremely high voter turnout levels seen in this era. Second, it is equally claimed that this era of American politics was brought to an end when the nation's white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) elite finally fought back and retook control of both political parties and government. Once in control, this elite implemented a series of electoral reforms that substantially reduced political participation on the part of the nonelites, the very backbone of highly participatory nineteenth-century American partisan politics. Engstrom and Kernell vigorously challenge both of these assertions, arguing first that parties energetically mobilized their supporters on Election Day and used their control of the ballot (and other institutional mechanisms) to spread party success across the entirety of the ballot, beginning at the top. Following this, they further argue, such practices came to an end when the parties—no longer able to keep up with the institutional and organizational demands of their far-flung enterprises—willingly accepted the Australian ballot as a way to regain greater operational certainty. The empirical analyses supporting the authors' arguments are the meat of this work.

The authors note in the Prologue that the origins of the research represented in this book can be traced back to a 1974 American Political Science Review exchange between two of the leading scholars of electoral history in the United States. On one side was Walter Dean Burnham (“Theory and Voting Research: Some Reflections on Converse's Change in the American Electorate”; “Rejoinder to ‘Comments’ by Philip Converse and Jerrold Rusk,”), forcefully arguing and defending the conventional wisdom outlined previously. On the other was Jerrold Rusk (“Comment: The American Electoral Universe: Speculation and Evidence,”), who argued that the precipitous early twentieth century decline in voter turnout was driven primarily by the introduction of the Australian (secret) ballot. Rusk further asserted that rather than a reform imposed on reluctant parties by angry WASP elites, the Australian ballot was in reality embraced by party leaders who were finding it increasingly difficult to maintain solidarity and order among their ranks. By extension, if the advent of the secret ballot drove the decline in voter turnout, then perhaps it was the presence of openly submitted partisan ballots, rather than intensely engaged and interested ethnoreligious voters, that produced such high levels of voter participation in the nineteenth century. In his above-cited rejoinder to Rusk, Burnham acknowledged that introduction of the Australian ballot did indeed take place right before voter turnout began dropping off, but insisted that the reform's impact was most likely not terribly large and also that it represented one of the many tools that elites used to disenfranchise the masses. Finally, Burnham closed by noting that at the point of his (and Rusk's) writing, the data to fully examine these questions empirically had not been gathered. Thanks to Engstrom and Kernell, this is no longer the case.

The gathering of the data necessary to empirically examine the dispute between Burnham and Rusk is enough by itself to make this a significant piece of work and to earn Engstrom and Kernell the gratitude of those of us who work in this area. First, the authors compiled a catalog of every significant non-suffrage-related change to American election laws (outside of the South, which is always excluded in these analyses) from 1840 to 1940 (the period under examination in the study). From there, they utilized Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) available data on election returns for president, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial elections, filling in gaps wherever possible. Finally, and most impressively, Engstrom, Kernell, and their team compiled a complete record of state legislative elections for all nonsouthern states over the entire time period, something that had never been done before.

With the explanations of the arguments and data gathering complete, the authors systematically and convincingly make their case. In Chapter 3, they demonstrate that in spite of many obstacles, nineteenth-century presidential elections were indeed the primary focal point for American voters. In Chapter 4 (perhaps the strongest chapter in a strong book), they show without a doubt that nineteenth-century House elections closely followed presidential results, and that astute party leaders carefully drew House district lines to maximize the benefit to the party of even small shifts in the presidential vote. In Chapter 5, we see that the Senate was not immune to a close linkage to the presidential vote, while Chapters 6 and 7 do the same for state legislative and gubernatorial elections, respectively. Across the board, elections for all of these offices were closely tied to presidential vote in the period before the introduction of the Australian ballot, and across the board these connections declined significantly post–ballot reform.

After engaging the work represented in this text, it is much easier to understand why contemporary American election results in many instances look very different from those of the nineteenth century.

Engstrom and Kernell close their study with a five-page discussion of the very significant implications of late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century reform, and here is perhaps my largest complaint with this work. This short discussion left me and will likely leave other readers wanting more. While this is, of course, not central to the study, the results of reform outlined at the end of the book demand more depth. The authors could have also examined whether the choice of office bloc versus party-column secret ballots was of any significance in terms of outcomes; the work of Marty Cohen and colleagues (The Party Decides, 2008) and Steven Schier (By Invitation Only, 2000) clearly merit attention here.

These are minor matters, however. Party Ballots, Reform, and the Transformation of America’s Electoral System is an impressive piece of research that will have long-lasting significance for the study of parties and elections in the United States.