A review of Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America, by John H. Aldrich.
About the Author
Seymour Martin Lipset is Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. His many books include Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960), American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996), and It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2000).
Three factors help to explain the historically wide split between the electoral and popular vote counts: economic and political fundamentals, polarization among voters over identity issues, and the sharply divergent ways in which the…