Political Science Quarterly
Volume 114 No. 3 (Fall 1999)

 

Pursuing Majorities: Congressional Campaign Committees in American Politics
By Robin Kolodny. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Reviewed by John R. Petrocik

 

Two themes organize Pursuing Majorities. The first is that the campaign committees have long been a preeminent part of the national party apparatus. They are not, Robin Kolodny’s analysis argues, organizational innovations from a recent cycle of party building. Their activity rates have increased, and they are involved in more aspects of campaigning, but they have been a feature of congressional elections for more than a century. The second theme argues that the conventional conception of the American parties as a tripartite structure with a facet in government, in the electorate, and existing as a separate organizational structure produces a poor understanding of them. Kolodny insists that a clearer perspective on the dynamics of the party system emerges when we acknowledge that the party organization is not separate from the party in government, but exists as an extension of the officeholders’ efforts to be reelected and become the majority. The national committee serves the electoral needs of the presidential candidate. The campaign committees seek to elect and send members to their respective houses with an eye to achieving and retaining a majority.

Kolodny’s argument and evidence are laid out in seven chapters. This first proposes the thesis that it is “separate elections in a separated system” that motivated the development of the campaign committees. This is also the point at which she makes a case that the campaign committees have more than an electoral role, insisting that the officeholders who have directed external electioneering activities of each party’s committee have used the campaign committee to demonstrate the talents their colleagues seek in a party’s leader. The next three chapters offer a detailed history of the evolution of the campaign committees, their establishment by the GOP in 1866 and the Democrats in 1870, the creation of campaign committees for the Senate with the direct election of senators, the activities of the committees, and the practices and conventions of the committees between 1920 and the emergence of the modern campaign regime after 1972. Despite limited primary and secondary historical materials, these chapters have a reasonably extensive description of the activities of the committees during their first hundred years and the identities of the individuals who directed them. The narrative may be too detailed for some, but the detail persuasively advances Kolodny’s argument that the campaign committees have been active institutions from the time they were established. The innovations and twists and turns of campaign committee chairs provide a rich historical bonus. Chapter 6 analyzes the relationship between leadership roles in Congress and service as a chair of the campaign committee. Kolodny’s conclusion that the campaign committees provide a try-out for ambitious members of Congress who look for a leadership position in their party may not persuade everybody, but the narrative makes the case with a wealth of interesting detail. The involvement of the National Republican Congressional Committee in the development of the "Contract with America" (Chapter 7) is an interesting case study of the involvement of the campaign committees in governing and elections.

The most interesting chapter (5) examines how the burst of campaign finance reform in the 1970s energized and reshaped the campaign committees. It explains how and why the committees were transformed from serving as conduits for campaign money to become sources of money; it documents each committee’s involvement in the development and dissemination of new campaign technology and how the GOP did it differently than the Democrats; it also elegantly describes how the committees became energetic users of soft money and how the Republicans have prospered more than the Democrats. Some of the specific evidence is new, some is familiar, but the weaving into an explanation of how campaign finance changes made the committees prominent players in the party caucuses is distinctive and original. All students of political parties ought to have this book. Its historical material alone makes it a useful reference. The chapter on the committees and campaign finance is close to being a must-read.