Book Reviews : Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics. Edited by HARRY R. DAVIS and ROBERT C. GooD. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960. Pp. xviii, 364. $6.50.)

• Published date: 01 December 1961
• Date: 01 December 1961
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400415
• Author: Morton Kroll
• Subject Matter: Articles

967
rural-based Radical Socialist party while disfavoring the industrially-based Com-
munist party.
Most inequalities, however, stemmed from the mode of election. In general,
majority balloting systems benefitted the hinge parties of the Center, parties able
to make electoral alliances both Right and Left. Uninominal districts favored
small parties but left minorites unrepresented. Balloting by list, on the other hand,
allowed for minority expression but favored large, well-organized parties. Systems
of proportional representation, though they generally tended to a more just
distribution of seats according to electoral results, greatly narrowed the voter’s
choice and essentially gave control of elections into the hands of party central com-
mittees, particularly those of large, well-disciplined parties. To some extent this
control was mitigated by such devices as panachage (allowing the voter to chose
candidates from different lists), preferential vote (permitting the voter to change
the order of a list), and apparentement (allowing different parties in the same elec-
toral district to group their candidates on a single list). On the other hand, these
devices could also be used artificially to distort parliamentary representation as
they did for the Third Force in 1951 and the Gaullists in 1956.
Thus electoral inequalities, though due in part to involuntary factors, were
also the conscious result of political expediency. Their eradication would seem
only to aggravate the problems of ministerial instability and the fractioning of
parties at the same time that they diminished still farther the voice of the individ-
ual in his own governance.
ALLAN H. KITTELL
Montana State College
Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics. Edited by HARRY R. DAVIS and ROBERT C. GooD.
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960. Pp. xviii, 364. $6.50.)
Two aspects of this volume merit consideration, its form and the impact
of Dr. Niebuhr’s ideas considered through the form. Professors Davis and Good,
...