Retrospective voting in American national elections

a useful introduction for an American audience to European historical social research. Most of the papers focus on technical problems of data availability and archiving, measurement and computerization. Three chapters are directly concerned with problems such as the generation of complex data files, preservation, storage and access, and new data bases. Five of the remaining 6 chapters are organized around the technical problems of dealing with themes such as time series, document content, personal networks, life histories, and administrative and census data. In their introduction the editors recognize this limited and initial character of European historical social research by pointing out that the papers do not represent more mature fields of inquiry. Yet one cannot remain wholly satisfied with these recognized limitations. There seems to be no inherent reason why historical empirical research utilizing quantitative data and social categories needs to be organized in so mechanical a fashion, shaped by the nature of the data and the technical problems of organizing it. It could be shaped equally well, although not as easily, around problems of conceptualization, in which choices of data to be examined and methods of juxtaposing it for analysis could be determined more by the substance of historical problems themselves. Only one of the topics presented here approaches this mode of research, an analysis by Heinrich Best of the petitions to the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848 and 1849. Best makes clear that he seeks to use his data to test previous theories about the course of political relationships among varied economic groups as the events of those two years unfolded. And his data provide an opportunity to go even further to sort out leading and lagging sectors of economy and politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. But few of the projects reported here seem to have such conceptual potential. American historical social research has experienced some severe limitations in conceptual relevance because of the very high degree to which its inquiries have been shaped by preoccupation with the technical aspects of making quantitative data manageable. As of yet, therefore, it has had only minor impact on larger analyses of American history. If organized around well-defined problems of historical conceptualization, it could play a far more significant role. From this volume one wonders if the same limitations cannot be predicted for historical social research in Europe as well.