Struggles, both political and intellectual, over electoral structures – the legal arrangements, to borrow from Harold Lasswell, of who gets to vote for what, when, and how – are probably as old as democracy. Suffrage, its expansion and contraction, is no doubt the most prominent historical feature in the politics and study of electoral structures. But the “how” and “for what” of voting have also played crucial, though perhaps less understood, roles in the politics of democratization. However important the right of suffrage, political power is also allocated by both the “space,” for lack of a better word, that a vote occupies and affects (for example, districts or at-large) and the object of the vote (for example, representation or a referendum). Electoral structures are the quintessential “mobilization of bias.”E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: a Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960). See also, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent: Elections, Citizen Control, and Popular Acquiescence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982). And they remain, in this era of universal suffrage, an ongoing object of contention even in stable regimes such as the United States.Indeed, few issues have such a consistent legal and political presence at all levels of American government. Most recently, the controversy over majority-minority districts has produced a significant political struggle involving state governments, Congress, the executive branch, and the courts, as well as a rapidly expanding scholarly debate over the rights and wrongs, and causes and effects of forms of minority representation: Abigail M. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Free Press, 1994); Carol M. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); David Lublin, The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Interest in the politics of constitutional amendment has increased dramatically over the past decade. In particular, there have been a number of recent works addressing the causes and consequences of the Seventeenth Amendment. Daniel Wirls is to be commended for his contribution regarding regional differences in interest and attitudes toward the direct versus indirect election of senators.

Ellis and King preface the substance of their response by suggesting that Wirls “seeks a straw man,” and that “it is unfortunate that Wirls chose to present his evidence in terms of a critique rather than as a supplement to previous studies,” thereby pushing them “onto the defensive.” I do not think I have violated any rules of academic cricket and I am certainly not addressing a straw man. In their original article, “Partisan Advantage and Constitutional Change,” King and Ellis elaborate one piece of empirical evidence (the systematic partisan bias and its reversal following the Seventeenth Amendment) and infer from this a plausible hypothesis (partisan competition as the primary cause of the amendment). My article attempts to show, first, that the bias was not caused by the process suggested by King and Ellis; second, that the partisan competition hypothesis is not clearly supported by several other forms of evidence; and finally, by contrast, that intra-party divisions were more obvious and influential in the fate of the amendment than was inter-party competition. My article, whether wholly correct or not, addresses directly the central empirical claims they make in their article and the direct hypothesis they draw from the evidence (to quote them directly): “The Senate, we believe, was freed from state legislative control primarily to enhance the Democratic party's ability to place its agents in office”Ronald F. King and Susan Ellis, “Partisan Advantage and Constitutional Change: The Case of the Seventeenth Amendment,” Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996): 92. In response, I ask, Where's the straw man?

“We must reckon first with the fact that Americans take for granted their right to do on their own property anything they please regardless of their neighbors,” Edward Bassett told his compatriots in the New York City zoning movement in 1913.Appended Report, Zoning and Districting, Minutes of the Heights of Buildings Commission, June 9, 1913, Heights of Buildings Commission, New York City Municipal Archives, Box 2507. Bassett, who has come to be known as the father of zoning, captured the thoughts of many planning advocates when he criticized the legal system for giving real estate owners almost total control over the use of their property. American cities would remain ugly, disorderly, and inefficient, Bassett and other aspiring planners feared, because the law did not adequately permit municipal authorities to regulate the use of private property.

Was the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) embrace of “voluntarism” a decisive turning point in American labor and political history? Voluntarism was the belief that trade unions should focus on “pure and simple” gains in wages and working conditions, rather than independent labor politics and industrial unionism. This belief dominated AFL strategy by 1900, and the results seem self-evident. By rejecting public health insurance, unemployment insurance, and inclusive labor regulations, the Progressive era AFL helped delay the emergence of American social welfare protections and contributed to their limited reach. By rejecting an alliance with a social democratic political party and by unionizing on the basis of broad industries rather than narrow crafts, the AFL circumscribed the scope and ambition of American labor organization. Today American trade unions provide far less inclusive representation of the workforce than is true in comparable nations,Franz Traxler, “Collective Bargaining and Industrial Change: A Case of Disorganization? A Comparative Analysis of Eighteen OECD Countries,” European Sociological Review 12 (1996):271–87; Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionism in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). and labor is not allied with an explicitly social democratic party as is true in virtually all other capitalist democracies.Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (1951; London: Methuen, Ltd., 1964, 20–22; Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Paty Systems: A Framework for Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1:192; Frances Fox Piven, ed., Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 77–109.

Imagine a political scientist who fell asleep twenty-five years ago. Now, she wakes up to a vibrant, new intellectual scene. The bookshelves in her office groan with work on historical institutions – the state is back in with a vengeance. Meanwhile, pluralist self-interest models have evolved into rational choice; the homely geometry metaphors (remember the “parallelogram of forces”?) have grown up into serious calculus.

I will discuss Civic Ideals in three contexts. The first is external to Smith's book: I propose a framework for a counternarrative, one that uses Smith's three-part classification of liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive values, but in order to carry a very different story. This counternarrative stresses the decisive role played by the “ascriptive values” of common law, religion, and nationalism in infusing both substance and power into the “thin” liberal and “thick” republican principles constituting the distinct political regimes of our political history. The second context is internal: here I explore the way Smith's argument is premised on the assumption that civic ideals are equated with national identity, making his argument and this book a “partisan” struggle for the soul of America. This is the case even though his method of analysis privileges (slightly thickened) national liberal civic ideals above more locally based republicanism as political democracy and above any and all ascriptive claims. In Smith's view, liberalism exists on a plane of rationality and truth that places it above the battle even though it must compete with traditions that have great power to elicit powerful political and moral loyalties. I extend this critique from theory to history by showing that Smith's legal-theoretical mode of analysis “works” as a plausible historical explanation only because it replicates a particular (that is, “partisan”) tradition of political discourse in America, namely the national republicanism of “reform liberalism.” Smith's “party” today is that of liberal perfectionism, a term currently in use to distinguish liberalism as a positive set of values from liberalism as a set of neutral procedures and principles. This replication is paradoxical, however, because that mode of discourse, exemplified in the rhetorical form of the jeremiad, was always part of a national political theology – “Americanist to the core” – institutionally anchored in an informal national intellectual-cultural-religious reform establishment that claimed nevertheless to embody universal or world-historical philosophical, moral, and religious values.

Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals is a grand project and an impressive achievement. As one expects from Smith's work, it combines scholarship and moral seriousness, and the effort to relate theory to practice, the present to the past. Notable for Smith's command of the details of policy – court decisions, statutes, and administrative history – Civic Ideals is also an invitation to rethink the nature of the United States as a political society, an inquiry into our political identity and purpose.

The editors of Studies in American Political Development and my three distinguished fellow contributors to this symposium have done me great honor by devoting so much attention to Civic Ideals. Their favorable remarks are much appreciated. Indeed, Carey McWilliams's final paragraphs capture what I was trying to do far more eloquently than I did, and I confess to having been quite moved by them. But I will focus here on the reviewers' searching criticisms, for those highlight both what I perceive as some important misunderstandings of the book's argument (for which I bear significant responsibility) and some real difficulties that I, too, see as unresolved in the work.