Redistricting in the New Millenium. Edited by Peter F.
Galderisi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 368p. $90.00 cloth.
Gatekeepers to the Franchise: Shaping Election Administration in
New York. By Ronald Hayduk. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2005. 282p. $35.00.
“The first instinct of power is the retention of power.”
The words are Justice Antonin Scalia's, but the core insight is one
long acknowledged by commentators and advocates across the ideological
spectrum. These two books examine the manifestations of this instinct, one
on the drawing of district lines and the other on the running of
elections. If neither book furnishes a definitive answer to the question
of how power's first instinct can be harnessed to promote a better
democracy, that is mainly a function of the intransigence and complexity
of the problems they so successfully illuminate.