This is an ambitious yet ultimately frustrating book. Written by seven anthropologists who undertook several years of intermittent ethnographic fieldwork in North Carolina in the late 1990s, the collaborative effort explores the currents of American democracy in five (two urban and three smaller) communities in an effort to gauge the state of democratic participation in America. By means of thumbnail portraits of ordinary people and grassroots organizations, the study at its best offers new theoretical insights into the political engagement and efficacy of individuals confronting the forces of globalization, market rule, and forces of privatization. The authors provide numerous examples of individuals in the five communities who are estranged from democratic institutions, documenting myriad structural barriers to participation for many residents. With dollops of guarded optimism, though, they also highlight the alternative modes of empowerment and political participation that individuals are able to achieve through various forms of voluntary grassroots associations. At the other extreme, the book elides a considerable amount of scholarly literature on democratic theory, political participation, local governance, and political power. It also suffers from being thematically disjointed, and at times reads not as a scholarly treatise but as a thinly disguised polemic against American plutocracy and government-by-outsourcing.

Unquestionably, the book offers a rich tapestry of the quotidian political life in North Carolina. Living in the five communities for varying lengths of times in the late 1990s, the authors observed meetings, conversed formally and informally with residents of all social strata, read local newspapers and listened to local radio stations, attended church and public meetings, endured youth soccer games, and visited informants in their homes. Empirically, the book is grounded by 93 in-depth interviews of people living in the five communities, along with portrayals of five local organizations. Political scientists, especially behavioralists keen on hypothesis testing, have much to gain from the numerous anecdotal insights into the political attitudes toward the public good and the various forms of political behavior in which ordinary people regularly engage. The political autobiographies, as the authors call them, also provide material for democratic theorists to tap regarding the limitations and possibilities of democratic politics at the local level.

Unfortunately, unlike many anthropologists whom political scientists often admire for their pluck, grit, and unguarded self-sacrifice, these researchers engaged in what might be called thin ethnography; the team did not reside with locals, perhaps depriving themselves of a fuller appreciation of the daily complexities of the personal lives of the individuals residing in the five communities. The resulting ethnographies of the informants are often casual, lacking the rigor of many anthropological studies. Reading between the lines of the narratives of the locals, it becomes evident that the anthropologists were in, but not of, these communities. Regrettably, many of the findings lack a convincing depth of understanding of why some residents were more comfortable participating in public life and others were more cowed.

Indicative of the impressionistic, rather than detailed, ethnographies that many political scientists have come to appreciate from anthropologists is the book's opening vignette. After attending a meeting of citizens discussing future planning efforts in Durham, one of the authors asked a couple outside the city's municipal building if he could help them find something. They replied that they had a question about their water bill. The researcher kindly informed them that a cashier was inside the building. But the anxious couple turned away, telling the academic that they did not want city hall. Knowing nothing more about the couple or the predicament they may have been in, the team of anthropologists present this chance meeting as evidence that the couple “lacked the confidence to even enter the building to pay a routine bill,” with the image of the couple's “estrangement” embodying the fact that “many people neither identify with their own government nor otherwise see themselves as meaningfully involved in their own governance” (p. 2). This is just one of numerous instances of the authors' overinterpretation that make the book a frustrating read.

Local Democracy Under Siege is also theoretically disjointed, likely the consequence of having seven authors. The themes of the book often become blurred—or worse, ignored—in many of the chapters. To be sure, there are flashes of theoretical brilliance on questions of political participation and public affairs in an age of globalization, market rule, and outsourcing. One such chapter on national governmental reform, globalization, economic restructuring, and suburban sprawl, while theoretically nuanced, is virtually devoid of any ethnographic data from the five communities that, if provided, could have bolstered its theoretical musings. A later chapter has a brief discussion of associational democracy and the concept of empowered participatory governance. While the authors find some evidence of grassroots groups countering plutocratic, often hegemonic local political regimes, the organizational structure, membership, and political activities of five small grassroots organizations are largely disconnected from the political autobiographies and landscapes of power offered earlier. Other chapters, when offering attitudinal or behavioral patterns of the informants, surprisingly decontextualize the commentaries from their geographic moorings, which the authors had emphasized at the outset as being an important consideration for understanding participatory opportunities and limitations.

Too often the portrayals strip away the different landscapes of power existing in the five communities from the personal narratives of the individuals they chronicle. For example, the authors provide no background on the “man whose home had no sewer and water services” or the “woman, whose paid job involved developing alternative education for homeless children” (p. 52), making it difficult to appreciate how myriad barriers to democratic participation may be accentuated by mediating factors identified as important by the authors, such as family, media, church, school, passions, values, dirty politics, the shame of silence, or “fear and the prison of the self” (p. 50). These concepts, so well theorized early on, are absent in subsequent chapters dealing with individuals' personal relationships with local democracy.

Finally, the book is riddled with minor, though distracting, factual errors, such as the misspelling of Lani Guinier's last name and the dates of Ronald Reagan's first term in office and the 104th Congress, as well as some peculiar observations, such as how mandated state reapportionment conducted in the 1960s “weakened local- and state-based political parties in favor of an electorate of individuals” (p. 111).

Despite its limitations, political scientists could learn a thing or two from the ethnographic approach employed by the authors. By examining problems with inductive reasoning, scholars can become more attuned to the varied social and political practices and problems facing ordinary people. In the end, the authors raise important questions regarding the structural dynamics of local governance and the everyday failures, and occasional triumphs, of ordinary Americans.