ANNA L. HARVEY. Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970. (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xiii, 253. Cloth $59.95, paper $18.95.
 

Anna L. Harvey's book answers a nagging question that has recurred perennially since 1920: why did women fail to use their votes effectively? Why didn't they develop a distinctive political voice? Harvey, a political scientist, develops an answer from the perspective of the 1990s, broadening the scope of inquiry to analyze women's political influence in the decades following the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification. Her deft mix of theory and evidence produces a compelling explanation.
 

Harvey's thesis, briefly put, is that women's exclusion from the vote prior to 1920 had "significant downstream consequences" for the type of electoral representation they later attained. In other words, history matters. It is a reassuring message to our profession and should predispose us to welcome the methodological insights this book provides. Harvey constructs a model for "a case of one" and uses it to "predict" the past; if an explanation meets the demands of the model, we may increase our confidence in its validity. Built into her model are recent theoretical constructs from political scientists about voter motivation and from economic historian Douglass C. North regarding constraints imposed by institutional structures. Her explanations of these are clear, concise, and fascinating.
 

What she "predicts" is that women's prior exclusion from suffrage limited the opportunities available to suffrage organizations once their goal was achieved. Had the market for women's votes been perfectly competitive, these organizations could have leveraged women's votes to secure concessions from, or even to compete with, the major political parties. But the League suffered a comparative disadvantage deriving from its successful pursuit of suffrage. The organizational structures and policies that secured the vote became obsolete with the suffrage victory; leveraging votes from within the electoral system was a fundamentally different process. The major political parties were much better equipped for this purpose. Practiced at turning out votes, and aware from the suffrage victory that women could be mobilized, Democratic and Republican party organizations moved quickly to recruit female voters by establishing women's divisions at every bureaucratic level from precinct to national. The effect of this brief head start over the League was surprisingly important, and explaining it is Harvey's key contribution.
 

Harvey's inquiry is guided by theories of voting's social benefits or "solidarity incentives," which appear to be a primary motivator for voters. Once a critical mass of voters identifies with a group, further recruits are added with minimal additional effort. To oversimplify Harvey's argument, the suffrage organizations performed the hard work of initiating the group "women voters," and while they were regrouping for a new task, Democrats and Republicans mobilized this group as partisan voters and reaped the benefits for years to come.
 

The League recognized its disadvantage fairly quickly, after campaigning against the anti-suffrage Republican incumbent in the New York Senate race of 1920 and suffering an embarrassing defeat. Shortly afterward, it began moving toward a policy of nonpartisanship. While League elites may not have realized the full impact of this strategy, it was a rational one, given that they had already lost electoral advantage. Once the threat of an independently coordinated women's vote was removed, parties leveraged women's votes for their own interests, and women's concerns were co-opted or ignored. The parties maintained control until institutional changes in the 1960s lessened their role as vote mobilizers; then, at last, extra-party mobilization of women became possible.
 

In short, the reason women failed to develop leverage was that they had earlier been denied the vote. The rules of politics and the institutional constraints that worked against them would have worked equally against males had they instead been the previously disfranchised group. Thus Harvey answers the nagging question of women's political "failure" without relying on such amorphous variables as climate of opinion, gender ideologies, or gendered political cultures.
 

These hard-to-pin-down terms have achieved significance in recent women's historiography, in part, from attempts to explain women's disappointing political record. Harvey's findings do not invalidate the many studies of gendered culture that have enriched our understanding of nineteenth and early twentieth-century women in areas far beyond traditional political categories. The book does, however, provide a healthy dose of empiricism, and its argument for the centrality of institutional structures is convincing. Further, Harvey's work serves as an exemplary model of social science research, with theory consciously shaping the questions that guide the research. Perhaps more important, it explains the long absence of women's political influence in a manner at once sensible and satisfying.
 

PATRICIA G. ZELMAN, Tarleton State University