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Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress. By Sarah A. Binder. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 236p. $59.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
Evelyn C. Fink, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Sarah Binder provides an impressive review of many reforms in the U.S. House as they affected the ability of the majority to enact and the minority to obstruct legislative outcomes. She examines selected reforms from the entire history of the House for an indication of the degree to which the reforms were motivated by policy needs. Binder impressively documents the increasingly common belief that changes in procedural rules are motivated by short-term policy preferences. She also conjectures that reforms are constrained by inherited rules.
Binder adds to the growing literature on genesis of rules reforms in legislatures by her careful documentation of historical changes as well as an interesting set of logistic regressions. Appealing to the sensibilities of both traditional and rational-choice scholars, Binder argues that two main predictors are behind the development of procedural change. The first is partisan need, which she identifies as the inability of a majority party coalition to enact short-term policy preferences. The second is partisan capacity, or the ability of the majority party to push through needed procedural changes. Each contributes to the literature on procedural reform. She finds that partisan capacity is dominant in predicting the suppression of minority rights in the nineteenth century but that partisan need dominates the twentieth century.
Binder takes a strong position differentiating the role of the capacity of a party to enact change from the...