In their 1984 book Protest Is Not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in City Politics, Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb argued that political incorporation of ethnic and racial minorities through an electoral coalition with white liberals was the key for minority access to power in urban areas of the United States. By means of conventional coalition politics, African Americans and Latinos could get what they wanted from government.

Now 22 years later, Peter Burns challenges Browning, Marshall, and Tabb's conclusion. By extending the assessment of political leaders' responsiveness to African Americans and Latinos in northeastern cities, Burns finds that electoral coalition politics is overrated as a progenitor of responsiveness to minority interests. Unconventional politics (especially civic and community organizing) tends to be more influential in encouraging leaders to respond favorably to African American and Latino interests.

What counts most in explaining why Burns reaches a different conclusion from Browning, Marshall, and Tabb is the long shadow cast by the traditional and unreformed politics of northeastern cities, compared to the reformed municipal politics of western cities. Political structure matters, Burns concludes. Conventional channels provide responsiveness to minority interests in the West because reforms limit the extent to which public officials use government as a patronage tool, but electoral politics provides limited receptiveness to minorities in the East because officials have the flexibility to use patronage to enrich themselves and their allies, rather than rewarding diverse constituencies in their electoral coalition.

To make this argument, Burns conducts a comparative case study of four middle-sized Connecticut cities (Bridgeport, Hartford, Waterbury, and Stamford). With considerable sophistication, he establishes that although all four are nonreform cities, they vary substantially according to the demographic, socioeconomic, political, and unconventional factors that might influence levels of responsiveness to African American and Latino interests. These and other variations allow him to test for the influence of a host of antecedent, causal, and intervening variables that, according to the argument of previous literature, influence responsiveness to minorities.

Having established the appropriateness of his cases, Burns then provides a systematic comparison of white, African American, and Latino leaders' perceptions of minority interests and the factors that affect awareness. Consistent with a growing number of studies, he finds that Latinos are faring less well than African Americans on a number of political dimensions and that these differences often lead to conflict. The variable that proves to have the most explanatory power for understanding differences between blacks and Latinos, as well as variations in their influence among the four cities, is extraelectoral resources. The level of minority civic organization influences leadership awareness.

Next, Burns assesses the extent to which leaders deliver on minority policy preferences. He uses two policy arenas of particular relevance to African Americans and Latinos: education and public safety. Regarding both, he finds that receptiveness to African American and Latino policy preferences is a concomitant of nonconventional channels—the interaction between community groups and officials, not electoral or socioeconomic variables regarded as important in previous research.

Through an in-depth case study of Bridgeport, Burns demonstrates how the process of using unconventional resources to promote policy responsiveness works. This study leads him to encourage neighborhood groups to collaborate, beginning with the development of a communication network, and to build organizational resources and consistent messages across groups (that is, to engage in what Robert Putnam has called “bridging capital”). In fact, although it is not Burns's aim to develop grand theory in this book, his empirical work advances both regime theory and social capital theory. In particular, his findings on the import of service-providing neighborhood groups supports Putnam's views on social capital, and the responsiveness to minorities in Bridgeport supports Clarence Stone's conclusion that “government creates relationships with actors who control non-electoral resources” (p. 115). Given both the author's theoretical contributions and the thoroughness of his empirical work (based on more than 200 elite-level interviews, electoral results, census reports, and other aggregate data), Electoral Politics Is Not Enough is a tour de force that should be read by scholars and practitioners alike who are interested in urban and/or minority politics.

To be sure, however, as with any work, there are flaws and sins of omission. For example, since one of Burns's key efforts is to show that things work differently in northeastern cities than they do in the western ones analyzed by Browning, Marshall, and Tabb, his analysis would be more convincing if it included at least one of the same policy arenas measured by those authors (for example, municipal appointments, employment, or contracts). There also should have been a chapter focused on the role of federal programs in affecting cities' responsiveness to minority demands. The book would benefit from a fuller discussion of whether—and if so, in what ways—federal social programs stimulate demand-protest, civic organizing, and electoral mobilization by increasing the availability of minority resources and leaders (and by contrast, whether the evisceration of federal urban programs in the last three decades deflates these activities and developments and fundamentally alters the political context that made minority gains possible). In short, while Burns is nothing short of brilliant in systematically describing and explaining the internal influences on what minorities can achieve in city politics through nonconventional channels, the analysis of contemporary racial politics in U.S. cities also needs to consider systematically the external influences on what minorities can be expected to achieve and what they actually achieve.

It should be noted that the book also occasionally demonstrates a facile treatment of race, ethnicity, class, and their intersections. For example, despite his disclaimers, the author demonstrates a tendency to blame Latinos for not being more politicized, better organized, and more skilled in amassing organizational resources. He barely addresses the reality that organization is itself an easier task to accomplish for more affluent groups. Relatedly, Burns fails to adequately tease out the ironies of the class dimension. For example, he finds that it is a city with a more substantial white working class (Bridgeport) that has white leaders who express greater awareness of African American and Latino interests, and it is the city with the most affluent whites (Stamford) whose leaders express least awareness. He interprets this finding to indicate that socioeconomic composition does not influence policy responsiveness to minorities. Could it be, however, just the opposite? Where minorities are joined by a sizable nonaffluent white population, the policy preferences for most whites, African Americans, and Latinos are similar—a development that stimulates leadership awareness and responsiveness on behalf of all traditionally excluded groups. Finally, in a few instances, Burns draws conclusions for which he provides no reputable supporting data and where the logic is questionable. For example, near the end of the book, he downgrades the importance of both electoral politics and descriptive representation by declaring that many minority elected officials maintain as much, if not more, allegiance to the official political apparatus as to their racial/ethnic communities. Yet he provides nothing more than anecdotes from a few African American and Latino leaders to back up this claim.

These are relatively minor quibbles, however, in an otherwise excellent book. Not only does Burns provide some hard and systematic thinking about the consequences of different patterns of political institutions, mass political behavior, organizational resources, and leadership in four northeastern cities, but on a broader scope, the book also develops and tests a model of urban political change. The author's model demonstrates that both structural and political contexts affect the likelihood of success of various participatory strategies; traces political change from the roots of participation to policy responsiveness; examines the relationships among protest, civic, and electoral politics; and provides a comparative study of African American and Latino political activity. Given the scope of the project, the book not surprisingly proves to be far more than a sequel to Browning, Marshall, and Tabb. Instead, it sheds new light on the well-traveled ground of urban politics and provides innovative building blocks for advancing a deeper understanding of the complex relationships among race, place, and representation in America.