Howard L. Reiter | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Howard L. Reiter | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy. By Sidney M. Milkis. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii, 228 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-8018-6194-2. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8108-6195-0.)

In The President and the Parties (1993), Sidney M. Milkis introduced a reinterpretation of the decline of partisanship in twentieth-century America. In place of the usual focus on public opinion and such factors as technology, media, and social mobility, Milkis attributed party decline primarily to political entrepreneurship. In that version, Franklin D. Roosevelt and, to a lesser extent, his successors sought to replace partisan regimes with an administrative state constructed upon an expanded understanding of political entitlements. In the process, citizen participation and democratic accountability have become attenuated. 1

In his new book, which combines greater concision with a broader historical sweep, Milkis has extended his argument through American political history. Nineteenth-century political parties rendered national politics accountable to states and localities and engaged the energies of the common people. In the early twentieth century, the Progressive movement sought to cure the excesses of party machines by building an administrative state subject only to public opinion and not to local partisans. They had mixed success, however, as Woodrow Wilson chose to govern as a partisan president. . . .

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