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ANTHONY KING, Running Scared: hy America's Politicians Campaign Too Much and Govern Too Little (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 244 + pp. $24.00 cloth (ISBN 0-684-82730-1).
Anthony King is an astute observer of the American political scene who thinks our system is just mudding along, so he chose to do something about it. This book is the result: his contribution to our political well-being, drawn up with sincerity and intelligence but tempered by the naivet6 of the smart outsider who can see, hear, touch, and smell our politics but who still lacks the feel of the true insider. King's main theme is stated up front:
[The book's] essence can be stated at once and very briefly. We will argue that America's elective politicians are more continuously worried about their electoral futures than are the politicians of any other country; that they therefore devote more of their time to electioneering; and that their conduct in office is more continuously governed by electoral considerations. . . they make it harder than it would otherwise be for the American system as a whole to deal with some of America's most pressing problems .... We will argue that ... there is a sense in which the system is too democratic and ought to be made less so. (P 3)
To explore this theme, King contrasts the careers and electoral relationships of three parliamentarians with whom he apparently spent considerable time learning about their styles of representation and their attitudes toward and relationships with their colleagues and their constituencies. These three are U.S. Representative Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), Sir Alan Haselhurst (British Conservative MP, Saffron Waldon, Essex), and Brigitte Shulte (SPD, German Bundestag, Hameln, Hannover).
The comparisons are, of course, a setup. In both the British and German systems, candidate selection is an internal party affair: they have no primary elections, of course; and on average their general elections occur about half as often as do those for the U.S. House of Representatives. In other words, American representatives face their constituencies about four times more often than do those in the other polities. This makes politics...