Lex Renda's Running on the Record makes an original contribution to our understanding of American politics in the Civil War era. Through all the political hoopla and the sectional crisis of the mid-nineteenth century, voters judged the parties on their governing records much more than their promises for the future. We could do worse today. -- Richard L. McCormick, President, University of Washington For two centuries politicians either have taken credit for current social and economic conditions or have been blamed for them by voters at the next election. Yet historians, especially of nineteenth-century America, have scarcely begun to examine the evidence of voter choice within this framework. Running on the Record is the first book-length effort to do so. In this valuable study Lex Renda uses retrospective voting theory -- a quantitative political science model for assessing political allegiances -- to explore the connections between voters' judgments and public policy in New Hampshire before, during, and after the Civil War. According to this theory, voters base their judgments and party loyalty not on proposals for future policy initiatives but on their assessment of a candidate or party's past performance. Renda's research focuses primarily on the correspondence of nineteenth-century New Hampshire politicians, editorials in the state's newspapers, and existing records of state legislative sessions. He analyzes the politicians' strategies, the appeals they made to voters, the social bases of electoral alignments, and the partisan dimensions of legislative behavior. His book integrates these elements and provides a history of the nexus between what people expected fromgovernment during the so-called party period and how they judged its effectiveness in achieving promised results. Renda's approach brings into focus the rationality of nineteenth-century voters, as well as the role of past policy making in influencing election outcomes. Running on the Record calls into question the work of historians who have argued that voters unversed in the technicalities of policy are politically incapacitated. It will be essential reading for social and political scientists as well as historians of New England.