When I finished the books on my shelves acquired in 2016, I knew I had mislaid several about elections and boundaries, and to my delight I located those a couple of weeks ago and am now going through them.

This is a collection of no less than 18 essays on electoral laws by the top-ranked political scientists of the day (early 1980s, published in 1986). All but one of the authors is male; all but one of the authors is white. The third chapter is a reflection by Maurice Duverger on “Duverger’s law”, first proposed by him forty years earlier, which pointed out (though in terms that are disputed) that majoritarian electoral systems tend to go with strong two-party political systems, whereas proportional electoral systems tend to go with multi-party political systems. The second paragraph of the third chapter, which includes a quote in the middle, is:

Certain errors of interpretation have resulted from my own tentative and imprecise formulations. An example is the alleged difference between “Duverger’s law” on the plurality rule’s tendency to create and maintain two-party systems and the “hypotheses” concerning the tendency toward multipartism of proportional representation and the two-ballot majority system, Riker’s (1982a; see also, chapter 1) analysis of this distinction is the most recent instance. In 1951, I did say in Political Parties that the former was “the closest to a sociological law among all the generalizations suggested in this book,” but this remark did not have the significance that was later attributed to it. It simply reflected my cautious attitude which was a reaction to the criticisms of the propositions that I first stated in 1945 at a conference at the University of Bordeaux (Duverger, 1946a, 1946b), where I presented the con-sequences of the three electoral systems as a “threefold sociological law.” I already discarded this expression in the paper presented at the 1950 Congress of the International Political Science Association which merely mentioned “three formulas” (Duverger et al., 1950, p. 13). But later I used it again in the first edition of my handbook Droit Constitutionel et Institutions Politiques which propounds “three sociological laws defining merely basic tendencies that interact with national and social factors” in terms which have hardly changed since then.

(1) Proportional representation tends to lead to the formation of many independent parties, . . . (2) the two-ballot majority system tends to lead to the formation of many parties that are allied with each other, . . . (3) the plurality rule tends to produce a two-party system (Duverger, 1955, p. 113).

In the more recent editions, the second law is formulated as follows: “The two-ballot majority system tends to produce multipartism tempered by alliances.”

The thing about Duverger’s ‘law’ is that it’s obviously true except when it isn’t. Majoritarian systems don’t always lead to concentration around two alternatives – Canada and India, and even the UK to an extent, have seen the two-party system rise and fall and rise again. And nobody ever mentions Malta, which despite having a proportional election system very similar to Ireland’s, has a rigid binary political divide – the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party between them have won literally every parliamentary seat since independence sixty years ago.

In general I found that the arguments here were largely in issues that I considered in my 20s, soon after the book was published, and a lot of it seemed very old-fashioned. There is a lot more experience of democratic systems now than there was in 1985, given that we have had an end to single-party politics in most of Eastern Europe, and the debate between whether proportional or majoritarian systems are better is basically over, after the failure of the 2011 referendum in the UK and the Trudeau government’s decision not to proceed with reforms in Canada in 2015. There’s also a lot of discussion of peculiar US electoral practices that the rest of the world is unlikely to copy.

Still, there were a couple of chapters that really stood out. One, by Gordon E. Baker, looked at the revolution in reapportionment in the US, and made the point that the shift to insisting on numerically equal populations in each state’s Congressional districts, plus various other contradictory court findings, has actually made it more difficult rather than easier to draw fair boundaries. Forty years on, I fear that this hasn’t changed. And Peter Mair has a lucid paper on gerrymandering in Ireland with multi-member constituencies and the Single Transferable Vote.

However, there’s also a crashingly unreadable review of (then) recent literature compiled by Taylor, Gudgin and Johnston (who were all capable of much better); and the most annoying thing about my 2003 reprint is that the OCR’ed typesetting has been poorly edited and the placement of the letter ‘f’ is irritatingly off-centre in the words “of” and “if”.

As I said, this is one of a cache of election-related books that I’m now going through. Next up is Comparing Democracies, edited by Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris. But you can get this one here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ahmed is sitting in front of one of the antique QD-LED monitors, data streaming down the screen like amber rain, bathing his face in amber light. Ahmed Andrushchenko is not a man who is well in the head, and lately his periods of lucidity have grown fewer and farther between. But Johnson doesn’t mind his company. Plus, the man’s obsessions with all the ways history might have gone, but didn’t, help to pass empty hours when the comfort of the sea and the village sounds drifting down from above and up from below, the motion of the barge on the waves, are not sufficient. Almost always, he’s harmless enough, is Ahmed Andrushchenko, and when he begins drifting towards the bad days, Johnson always manages to keep him from tearing up the cabin they share below the markets. Different rhythms soothe different people, and Ahmed says that Johnson’s voice soothes his tattered mind.

I felt a bit guilty about not really understanding this book. It’s an ambitious cross-time dark agencies story set in various places around the world, notably Dublin and New England; but I really didn’t get what was going on. But then I checked the other online reviews and most readers had the same reaction. Second in a series apparently, but that’s no excuse. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is How to be Invisible, by Kate bush.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Silver relied on his many connections to get the Big 3 booked on The Danny Kaye Show and The Tonight Show, but unfortunately the record company failed to market and promote the album, and sales were disappointing.

Most people will have bought this because they are interested in the subject, and I am probably unusual in that I came to it more interested in the author. Owen Elliot-Kugell is one of my twins, born like me on 26 April 1967, along with Trish Doller, Warren Read and Nicki Elson, and the book is half the story of her mother and half her own story after her mother’s early death.

Her mother was Cass Elliot, born Ellen Cohen, who enjoyed a meteoric career as one of the Mamas and the Papas in the late 1960s, and I must admit that I found myself being thoroughly earwormed by the Mamas and the Papas greatest hits as I read the book. Cass Elliot struggled with obesity throughout her adult life, and died of a heart attack aged 32 in London in 1974, leaving a seven-year-old daughter (whose biological father had never been part of her life).

Owen Elliott-Kugell, admittedly not a dispassionate observer, thinks that her mother was the best singer of the Mamas and the Papas, and I agree that there is a very good case. Perhaps the best showcase of her vocals is “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, where sadly there doesn’t seem to be any readily available footage of the group performing, but there is plenty of audio:

She also made it one of her signature songs in her solo career:

She also took the lead in the Mamas and the Papas’ performance of “Dancing in the Streets”, here live at the 1967 Monterey festival, just a few weeks after baby Owen was born:

But even in the songs where one of the other group members takes the lead, you can hear Elliot’s vocals soaring and swooping, making the music as memorable as it was. The internal personal dynamics of the group were often poisonous, but as an ensemble their performances are riveting fifty-five years on.

After the inevitable break-up of the Mamas and the Papas, Cass Elliot had a decent enough solo career but struggled to reach quite the same heights. Occasional failures, such as her first live show in Las Vegas, were devastating. Her weight was always an issue, and in the months before her death she had in fact been hospitalised several times as a result of fainting and similar problems. (It had started early; one of The Mamas and The Papas’ songs had the repeated lyric: “And no one’s getting fat, except Mama Cass”.) Her size became part of her branding, but it must have been awfully uncomfortable for her. She starred as herself in an episode of Scooby Doo a few months before her death; and the fat-shaming jokes in the script (in a show aimed at children of the age that her daughter and I would both have been at the time) are pretty awful.

Cass Elliot conceived her daughter fully intending to be a single parent, and was by Owen Elliot-Kugell’s account a dedicated mother, though clueless about money (she died intestate, and her estate remained in debt until the invention of the compact disc a decade later liberated a new revenue flow). Owen describes the rush of emotions on hearing for the first time, twelve years after her mother died, the introduction to her song “Lady Love”:

One of the iconic photographs of Elliot’s (perhaps too generous) hospitality has the baby Owen chewing on a film canister, watching Joni Mitchell performing songs from her as yet unreleased first album. Eric Clapton waves a joint at the photographer (Henry Diltz) and a glowering David Crosby smokes a rollup. (Crosby, Stills and Nash were put together by Cass Elliot.)

The book is a tremendously moving portrait of a great musical talent and a loving parent who died too soon. There is one rather obvious gap – Cass Elliot’s brief marriage to a journalist in 1971 is not mentioned at all, though it’s mentioned in every other reference to her life. Owen told the Guardian that this was because “he talked shit about her. And it wasn’t like their marriage changed her life. He was just another opportunist.”

The second half of the book covers the author’s life after her mother’s death. She was adopted by her mother’s sister and brother-in-law (also musicians) in Massachusetts, but as a young adult gravitated back to her grandmother in Los Angeles, where she found a boyfriend (also a musician) and married him; they have two children, now adults, the older born when Owen was 32, the same age as her mother when she died.

A particularly poignant subplot explores how Elliot-Kugell found her biological father at the age of twenty; he had never been part of her life before and did not become a major part of it after, except at the end of his own life when she became responsible for sorting things out, there being nobody else available. But the whole book is basically about her relationship with her mother, who died fifty years ago next month. I must say that I ate it up. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was the bridge between seasons; the days were hot, but the uncertain weather of autumn was near. Any night might bring storms, or worse, one of the tearing winds from the mountains. Every loaded cart and filled barn was triumph, every uncut field a whip cracking over their heads. This work Rahike did not command, it was too important to be left in the hands of one so new to authority; the Old Mistress did not keep her chair at Harvest, and her successor dwindled to a pupil indeed. Piety demanded that every daughter share the first day of work on her mother’s farm, although in fact Rahike’s mother hardly needed her help, since she grew less grain than green crops which had a longer gathering season; but after that the Young Mistress’s concern was with the public farmlands, and most of her time was spent going about them. The working days were long, under a sun that burned even the city women who were pale most of the year; but the urgency of the task gave it zest, and there was gaiety in the shared labour. A Harvest when all went well, as it did that year, was like a long festival. It was a time Rahike had enjoyed all her life, through all the years she had spent it on her mother’s farm; but that year, riding about her beloved land with a greater harvest to gather and a greater part to play, she felt her life brimming over.

I picked this up from the freebies table at Novacon in 2021, and I’m sure it was one of the books I looked at but never thought of borrowing from Finaghy library in my teens. It’s about unorthodox love in a pastoral society where men and women live separately, with women doing the hard work of parenting and agriculture (and indeed governing) and men floating around as craftsmen, doing occasional impregnation.

I didn’t find the premise terribly believable; of course it’s a utopia, but I wondered how such a society could come to be, and how often situations like the (supposedly unprecedented) forbidden love between the protagonists would occur. So I’m afraid I wasn’t engaged by the plot, though I can see how it would appeal to some readers. You can get it here.

Given that it’s set in a matriarchal society, it’s an easy Bechdel pass, starting with the very first conversation in the book.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Then begins a process of learning and adaptation. Each tool will have its own personality and quirks, and will need its own special handling. Each must be sharpened in a unique way, or held just so. Over time, each will wear according to use, until the grip looks like a mold of the woodworker’s hands and the cutting surface aligns perfectly with the angle at which the tool is held. At this point, the tools become conduits from the craftsman’s brain to the finished product—they have become extensions of his or her hands. Over time, the woodworker will add new tools, such as biscuit cutters, laser-guided miter saws, dovetail jigs—all wonderful pieces of technology. But you can bet that he or she will be happiest with one of those original tools in hand, feeling the plane sing as it slides through the wood.

I got this for F a year or so ago, at his request, but it then bubbled its way to the top of my own reading list so I gave it a try. I am not in any way a programmer, so about 60% of it is completely irrelevant to my life and work; but I was surprised at how pertinent the other 40% is – there is lots here about project management, information management, client management, people management and, simply, management. Perhaps the authors should do a shorter version – “The Pragmatic Programmer for non-programmers managers”, maybe? Anyway, you can get it here.

This was both my top unread non-fiction book and my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on those piles respectively are South, by Ernest Shackleton, and Hard to Be a God, by the Strugatsky brothers.