Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress. By Eric Schickler. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 356p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

For those of us who watch Congress and steep ourselves in its history, there are a handful of theories purporting to explain how and why Congress changes. Political parties behave like cartels gathering power at another’s expense.  Election-minded members shape Congress to ease the passage of pork-barrel bills and to trade votes. Congress often seems designed to encourage legislators to become policy experts, and their expertise is protected by deference to committees that fairly closely represent the interests of the whole House or Senate.  For at least the last fifteen years, and in the name of New Institutionalism, full-throated fans of various theories have been arguing over which one is “right.” 

In Disjointed Pluralism, Eric Schickler looks at the history of congressional rules, committee structures, and congressional leadership through the various lenses of theory.  He emerges with an argument that none of the prevailing theories is really right all the time and none of the theories is really wrong, either.  That criticism is not new or by itself very helpful, but Schickler does everyone better in inducing a theory about how various interests engage in a continual interplay over congressional power.

The “pluralism” in Schickler’s title is a bevy of “collective interests” that might spur innovations in congressional design.  These include political parties, chamber-centered interests, individual power bases, policy interests, and reelection interests.  No one cause of congressional change is predominant, and “disjointed pluralism portrays institutions as multilayered historical composites that militate against any overarching order in legislative politics” (17).  Furthermore, “congressional development is disjointed in that members incrementally add new institutional mechanisms without dismantling preexisting institutions and without rationalizing the structure as a whole” (17-8).

Schickler makes four claims about how congressional institutions change, and each is successfully defended in case studies and through careful empirical work.  First, several collective interests (or theories that have typically been offered) are in play each time there are important changes in congressional institutions.  Second, advocates of change in Congress appeal to multiple interests by, for example, fashioning temporary coalitions among believers in strong parties and members pursuing reelection.  Third, new institutions typically layer on top of preexisting ones, so that exploring congressional rules and procedures is not unlike an archeological dig, appearing “more haphazard than the product of some overarching plan” (15).  Finally, the whole system is dynamic in that changes promoting one collective interest (say, the desires of policy experts) provoke contradictory reforms from other collective interests.

Just as there is no overarching plan in the design of Congress, Schickler’s theory itself seems disjointed and at times patched together from a plurality of interesting explanations, path dependency among them.  I suspect that the book will not be remembered for its theory, unless the notion of path dependency can be more explicitly developed in subsequent articles.  And I risk making an especially nit-picky comment here: the book would have been better labeled simply by what comes after the semi-colon: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the US Congress. 

Why?

Schickler’s theory reads more like an ad hoc explanation, but as a nuanced, rigorously researched and theoretically informed description of congressional reforms, Disjointed Pluralism is a tour de force.  Schickler covers reforms in four periods, 1890-1910, 1919-1932, 1937-1952, and 1970-1989.  The result is the best and most comprehensive work on congressional reform since Joseph Cooper and David Brady were writing sweeping histories twenty years ago. 

Schickler’s research is exhaustive but never exhausting to read, and he blends case studies with logit analyses in ways that should be a lesson to us all.  Disjointed Pluralism is now, and for some time will be, the definitive analysis of the history of congressional reforms since the 1890s.  There are some jarring surprises, which Schickler argues convincingly.   Notably, Schickler shows that the late 1800s and early 1900s, an era of strong parties, partisan interests did not singularly drive congressional reforms.  Multiple interests, as in all other eras, were very much in play.

If congressional reforms emerge from a mixture of collective motives, reelection interests play a minor role.  Schickler categorized forty-two reforms, beginning with the adoption of Speaker Reed’s rules in 1890, yet “there is surprisingly little evidence that members’ shared reelection interest has driven development in the four periods examined” (255).  That conclusion may jar students of Mayhew’s 1974 book, but Schickler is a Mayhew devotee (and his former Ph.D. student at Yale).  Indeed, throughout the four periods, congressional changes seem driven by policy interests, the creation of individual power bases, a tug-of-war with the executive branch, and the flux of power between the parties.  And as Schickler shows, when one constellation of interests makes a change, there is an almost inevitable path-dependent reaction from the forces that lost in the previous reforms.

Disjointed Pluralism is, wisely, not teleological, but in arguing that new institutional structures are evermore layered on top of the old, Schickler misses an opportunity to explain when and why older edifices are explicitly exploded.  Schickler is right that, “The effectiveness of institutional change has repeatedly been compromised by the need to accommodate a preexisting authority structure that privileged other interests” (252).  But the word repeatedly in that sentence should not be read as “inevitably.” 

The development of legislative institutions does tend toward complexity and layering, but on occasion whole lines of precedents and whole sections of the rules are jettisoned entirely.  This is most likely to happen early in a legislature’s history, as we are seeing today with the Russian Duma, the Ukrainian Rada and so on.  Perhaps this dynamic would have been more evident in Congress had Schickler’s analysis begun with the late 1700s instead of the 1800s. 

That is too much to ask, I know, because Eric Schickler’s attention to detail and careful analysis of the last 100 years is a wonderful achievement in itself.  Thanks to Disjointed Pluralism, full-throated fans of various single-cause theories will have a lot to talk about.