If you're shopping for a POLITICAL GEEK this holiday season, you might try to dig up a copy of Anthony King's Running Scared (Free Press, 1997). It's out of print, which is a real shame, but your friends probably haven't read it. I found my copy at Georgetown Used Books in Bethesda. The German immigration decision got me thinking about the fact that this book deserves a wider circulation. I encountered it in graduate school and just used it in my Introduction to Politics course this semester; I couldn't get my students all that excited about Locke or Tocqueville, but they really seemed to like this book -- judging by the exams, of course, which is not a perfectly reliable indicator of interest, to be sure. But the book is an excellent read. Plus, out of print books make really cool gifts: they show initiative, affection, and an eye for quality, IMHO.

The book begins with a comparative discussion of the campaign experiences of three legislators: Sir Alan Haselhurst, a conservative from Saffron Walden in the UK, Brigitte Schulte, from the SPD in Hameln, Germany, and Steny Hoyer, Democrat from Maryland's 5th District. The broad point is that Haselhurst and Schulte don't feel nearly as much electoral pressure as Mr. Hoyer. Haselhurst and Schulte don't have to face primary challenges. They don't have to raise bucketloads of cash for their campaigns (since there are severe restrictions on advertising in both Germany and the UK, and since parties finance the bulk of the campaign). They can position themselves as good party members and do just fine at the polls. Finally, they don't have to face a general election every two years.

King uses this discussion as an introduction to the institutional distortions that arise from our hyperdemocratic sensibilities. He argues that the U.S. has a strong tradition of "agency democracy," meaning a belief that representatives exist to give effect to their constituents' will at every moment, while the rest of the democratic world (perhaps with the exception of Switzerland) has a stronger tradition of "division of labor" democracy," the view that representatives are there to specialize in the task of governing, and the only real effective control over them is to get together and "kick the bums out" every once in a while.

King then describes the policy distortions that arise from the excessive electoral pressures on the U.S. House. A highlight is his discussion of the symbolic politics of the "war on crime."

This book will change your life. Or at least your perspective on politics. For King, the problem with American democracy is not that representatives are somehow out of touch with the public -- a view you can hear repeated almost hourly by pundits from both left and right. Rather, the problem with American democracy is that our legislators are too focused on the public's will. According to King, the cure for American democracy is not more democracy, but less democracy. Some of the proposals that King advances are to lengthen the term of office in the House from 2 to 4 years, the term in the Senate from 4 to 8, and to coordinate them all with the Presidential elections. Lest you dismiss these proposals as parliamentary imperialism: Lyndon Johnson's State of the Union Address from 1966 made similar proposals.

King's Tocquevillian impulse here is clear. Make the holidays special for the political geek in your life by giving him or her a provocative and intelligent book with a comparative perspective. They'll love you for it!