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Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress By Eric Schickler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.356p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.
David C. King, Harvard University
For those of us who watch Congress and steep ourselves in its history, there are a handful of theories purporting to explain how and why Congress changes. Political parties behave like cartels gathering power at another's expense. Electionminded members shape Congress to ease the passage of porkbarrel bills and to trade votes. Congress often seems designed to encourage legislators to become policy experts, and their expertise is protected by deference to committees that fairly closely represent the interests of the whole House or Senate. For at least the last 15 years, and in the name of New Institutionalism, full-throated fans of various theories have been arguing over which one is "right."
In Disjointed Pluralism, Eric Schickler looks at the history of Congressional rules, committee structures, and Congressional leadership through the various lenses of theory. He emerges with an argument that none of the prevailing theories is really right all the time and none of the theories is really wrong either. That criticism is not new or by itself very helpful, but Schickler does everyone better in inducing a theory about how various interests engage in a continual interplay over congressional power.
The "pluralism" in Schickler's title is a bevy of "collective interests" that might spur innovations in Congressional design. These include political parties, chamber-centered interests, individual power bases, policy interests, and reelection interests. No one cause of...