Book Review

Alexander Keyssar's largely intellectual history of suffrage throughout the nation's history and Mark Lawrence Kornbluh's largely quantitative analysis of the transition from nearly universal male political participation in the late 1800s to the much less active polity of the twentieth century underscore a simple but often neglected lesson: Because words and behavior are sometimes at variance, scholars should study both. The division of labor between these two books leads to contradictory conclusions. Despite mentions of low contemporary voter turnout and unequal political power at the beginning and end of his book, Keyssar's is mainly a hopeful story of the sometimes reversed but eventually successful dismantling of class, race, and gender barriers to voting, in that unusual order of emphasis. Kornbluh's is explicitly a story of decline, from a late-nineteenth-century polity in which nearly every man, at least in the North, not only voted but argued, marched, and often organized for his party, to a deferential, interest group- and expert-dominated political system in the twentieth. In one, democracy flowers; in the other, it withers.	1
Limitations on their research strategies call some conclusions of both books into question. Thus, Keyssar's deliberate inattention to voting behavior undermines his four-period chronology. No doubt his first period, from the 1780s to 1850, saw loosened legal restrictions on suffrage. But since most colonial historians estimate that 60–80 percent of adult white males could vote, how much did suffrage actually broaden during the first generations of the Republic? In light of the extremely high turnout rates from 1840 through 1896 and the lengthy, but ultimately successful, struggle for woman suffrage, is Keyssar justified in calling 1850 the beginning of a period of contraction, a "slow Thermidor"? Since women's voting participation gradually rose after the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) and since the basis for the full enfranchisement of African Americans was firmly laid in the 1940s and 1950s, is it correct for him to characterize the period from 1920 to 1960 as "the quiet years," a period of "relatively little change"? And since, according to most accounts, turnout decreased substantially from 1960 to the present, is this really, as Keyssar terms it, an era of "breaking barriers"?	2
Not only Keyssar's periodization but also his emphases and conclusions derive from the fact that his book is a description of conversations about suffrage, not of changes in voters' actions or the causes or consequences of those changes. More concerned with high-flown rhetoric about principles than with analyses of why particular laws passed or failed, Keyssar cannot systematically weigh the reasons for alterations in suffrage; instead he repeatedly just lists many incommensurable factors. This does not stop him from off-handedly (and unjustifiably) dismissing explanations based on partisanship or self-interest as "superficial" and embracing sound-bite-sized theories as "deeper" reasons for conflict over voting regulations. Keyssar seems insufficiently aware that policy debates are full of rationalizations—none more than those that distribute political power.	. . .