This new book by Brian Schaffner, Jesse Rhodes, and Raymond La Raja is a must-read for political scientists interested in urban and local politics, class and inequality, race and ethnicity, representation and electoral systems, public opinion, and political behavior. The authors do an excellent job reviewing and synthesizing relevant literatures across all these fields: that alone makes it highly valuable. With its careful research design and thorough empirical analyses, the book serves as an informative methodological primer on how to do work that crosses all these fields. Moreover, compelling visualizations throughout, the use of some real cases, an understanding of the cases’ local contexts, and persuasive narratives enliven the arguments and empirical findings, rendering Hometown Inequality: Race, Class, and Representation in American Local Politics suitable for general readers as well. Given the practical implications of the findings, the book could also be useful for elected government officials at all levels.

The authors use unique data to analyze the extent of inequality in ideological representation between voters and (1) their local council members and (2) local policy outcomes throughout the cities and towns of the United States. The analytic focus is on inequalities between racial and class groups. The first part of the book documents the extent to which these inequalities are prevalent across US towns; the second part seeks to understand why this is the case. In so doing, the authors use three theoretical lenses: (1) coincidental representation—how much minority or less affluent groups’ ideological preferences coincidentally overlap with those of majority or wealthier groups; (2) electoral institutions—on- vs. off-cycle election timing, district vs. at large, and partisan vs. nonpartisan; and (3) a self-reinforcing economic and racial inequality lens.

Four major findings enrich our understanding of racial and economic disparities of representation in municipal governments. First, inequalities in ideological representation are significant among both race and class groups throughout US communities. For example, minority voters (i.e., Black and Hispanic) have far less representation than their white peers. Less affluent groups similarly receive less representation than wealthier ones. Yet racial inequality in ideological congruence representation is much more profound than economic inequality: Black voters are in the most disadvantaged position in the spectrum of representation disparity compared to the Hispanic group.

Notably, these patterns are widely observed, not only in large urban cities and medium-sized suburbs but also in small towns, especially those in rural areas. In fact, the representation gap is more significant in smaller towns than in larger urban cities and suburbs. The book’s title Hometown Inequality is seemingly coined from this finding.

Last but not least, coincidental representation among the three theoretical lenses provides the most support in explaining observed gaps in representation for both race and class groups. Although the self-reinforcing economic and racial inequality lens provides some modest support, sadly, electoral institutions at best show a minor role, suggesting that institutional reforms cannot resolve these systematic inequalities in local representation.

These findings are truly novel, given that previous research has not documented such representational gaps at the local levels due to a lack of necessary data. Although we know from Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw’s (“Representation in Municipal Government,” American Political Science Review, 2014) work that municipal politics is ideological in urban areas, one would have thought that the representational inequalities between groups would be greater in large and more diverse urban areas than in small towns. The authors challenge this notion and show the opposite by using Catalist data, nearly population-level records for registered voters.

Some findings, however, beg more questions, offering avenues for future study. For instance, the authors examine the inequality between racial groups first and then the disparity between class groups to compare them. This approach ignores the intersectional identity of voters—namely, that those who sit at the bottom of the wealth distribution are more likely to be members of racial and ethnic minorities. Indeed, as the authors acknowledge and as has been shown by a growing body of research (Rodney Hero and Morris E. Levy, “The Racial Structure of Economic Inequality in the United States: Understanding Change and Continuity in an Era of Great Divergence,” Social Science Quarterly, 2016; Rodney Hero and Morris E. Levy, “The Racial Structure of Inequality: Consequences for Welfare Policy in the United States,” Social Science Quarterly, 2018; Brian An, Morris Levy, and Rodney Hero, “It’s Not Just Welfare: Racial Inequality and the Local Provision of Public Goods in the United States,” Urban Affairs Review, 2018), race and economic inequality are intertwined. Treating race and class independently to see which one shows greater inequality may be a less useful approach because people are members of both groups simultaneously.

Further, the authors use terciles in the wealth distribution to classify everyone into three groups, but this approach ostensibly underestimates economic inequality given what we know: wealth distribution is highly skewed. Unlike for racial groups, the choice of a tercile approach to wealth distribution is also arbitrary and leads one to question whether the analytic focus is comparable between racial and wealth groups. Hence, instead of comparing racial and class groups, a future study could examine how much more severe the representation problem would be at the intersection of racial and economic inequality, thereby revealing which is the truly most disadvantaged group.

In examining the predictors of inequality in representation, the analysis finds a limited role for electoral institutions. Local election timing shows a relatively more significant role among the three institutions, but jurisdiction and ballot type do not. Yet the authors’ analysis is cross sectional, meaning that the effects are only estimated from between-jurisdiction variations. Although we know much more about the role of election timing in local politics (Adam M. Dynes, Michael T. Hartney, and Sam D. Hayes, “Off-Cycle and Off-Center: Election Timing and Representation in Municipal Government,” American Political Science Review, 2021; Vladimir Kogan, Stéphane Lavertu, and Zachary Peskowitz, “Election Timing, Electorate Composition, and Policy Outcomes: Evidence from School Districts,” American Journal of Political Science, 2018; Sarah Anzia, “Election Timing and the Electoral Influence of Interest Groups,” Journal of Politics, 2011), less work has been done on jurisdiction (district vs. at large) and ballot type (partisan vs. nonpartisan). Notably, recent research that uses a causal frame finds that conversion from at-large to ward elections in school district governance can enhance the descriptive representation of minorities under certain conditions (Carolyn Abott and Asya Magazinnik, “At‐Large Elections and Minority Representation in Local Government,” American Journal of Political Science, 2021). Whether these findings are generalizable to other layers of local governments beyond school districts can be examined by future research (see Jessica Trounstine and Melody E. Valdini, “The Context Matters: The Effects of Single‐Member versus At‐Large Districts on City Council Diversity,” American Journal of Political Science, 2008).

Political geographers may also want to understand how much spatial dimensions account for the observed inequalities. For instance, all of the 20 towns with the greatest differences in ideology between African Americans and whites are located in the South (p. 73). As the authors note, this is not surprising considering the origins of racial resentment and how it still strongly shapes Southern politics (Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics, 2018). An interesting question, however, is how much the South drives the overall findings. Conversely, to what extent is this a story of whites’ geographic sorting? Is this finding largely driven by more liberal whites—who have a much more diverse and diffuse ideological spectrum than minority groups as revealed in the book—choosing to live in more varied and large urban cities?

The book elucidates clearly how municipal governments’ policy liberalism (or conservatism) score was measured from International City/County Management Association (ICMA)’s Sustainability and Economic Development surveys. Still, practitioners may be less clear about how to improve the responsiveness of their government. That is, they first need to understand how their constituency’s ideological preferences map onto different municipal policy domains and how much these linkages differ by racial groups. This also begs the long-standing question of how to objectively measure the “responsiveness” of municipal policy other than by relying on government officials’ self-reported survey measures. Would spending by policy areas, mainly redistributive programs, be enough? What about nonredistributive policies then? Are there any measures that allow researchers to track how much is spent on low-income households or minorities? What about the spatial dimension in public investment across racially segregated neighborhoods? To be clear, the book makes great strides in measuring constituent ideology by race and wealth groups at the local level. Still, future research could do more on measuring municipal governments’ policy responsiveness, especially for different races and class groups.

Finally, some qualitative case studies could offer more insights than the authors’ generic recommendations that appear at the end of the book. The book illustrates some adverse community cases but pays virtually no attention to the constructive cases, which also exist in the data. In addition to coincidental representation, what are the unique circumstances or generalizable conditions of cities and towns with better and more responsive representation? Could we find, for instance, any evidence of ground-up or coalition-building approaches? The authors do a great job in rank ordering and documenting the representational inequalities. The next step could be to use those positive outlier cases to identify what these hometowns uniquely share.

Since Jessica Trounstine (“All Politics Is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics,” Perspectives on Politics, 2009) noted how research on local politics could contribute to broader debates in political science, we have seen increasingly renewed attention to subnational politics in recent years. Adding to this trend, Hometown Inequality will rejuvenate the study of city politics and offer important insights not only for those interested in local politics but also for students of class and inequality, race and ethnicity, representation and electoral systems, public opinion, and political behavior.