This book, though designed for use as a college textbook on American party politics, has much to interest the general reader as well. Its coverage of the structure and activities of major and third parties is distinguished both by its tough-mindedness of inquiry and its avoidance of diffuse description for the sake of description.
Ranney and Kendall do not assume the first word in their title to be so well understood that its meaning may remain implicit, or be conveyed by platitudes. The first eighty pages expound the elements of a model of democracy, which are then used throughout the book to assess the merits and demerits of the parts and the sum of the American party system. This deliberate and open statement of standards, and repeated use of those standards for evaluating empirical findings, deserves wider adoption in the discipline of political science. Not the least of the virtues of such an approach is that the reader is able to say with some precision just where and how he disagrees with the interpretations offered.
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