This excellent book explores how and why people participate in politics, focusing mostly on those without the educational, financial, and civic resources that enable democratic participation in the United States. How is it, Hahrie Han asks, that a large, underresourced population returned to New Orleans against great odds to vote in a mayoral election? Han problematizes the received wisdom about political participation, bringing new attention to the seemingly intractable problem of political inequality in the United States. How did these people manage to come from out of town, many of them busing in and out on the same day, to vote in a municipal election? If we find the answer to this question, we may discover new ways to expand political participation in the United States, particularly among those populations that seem to be the most difficult to pull into the democratic decision-making process.

Reviewing the research on political participation, Han points out that current analyses focus on resources and interests to the detriment of motivation. What drives people to take political action? Current studies of political participation—as well as standard practices aimed at getting out the vote—emphasize activation rather than mobilization. It is well established that interested, better-resourced citizens are more likely to vote, and many campaigns work by identifying those voters who are likely supporters. They aim to make it easier for already-identified supportive voters to get to the polls. These methods activate those already engaged in the political process, but they prematurely write off those who appear uninterested in politics or who appear not to have the resources required to vote.

These models and techniques significantly underestimate the population that is likely to participate, Han argues, because they mistakenly model political interest as general interest, rather than issue based. An alternative approach, based on the analysis of “issue-publics,” does better at explaining participation among underresourced groups and offers new ways to think about mobilizing groups at all levels of income. Many people are not motivated to vote by a general interest in electoral or institutional politics. Rather, they are motivated by some specific issue (preserving some local environmental resource, improving local public schools, and defending their homes and neighborhoods from developers or slumlords). They are drawn into politics through civic and seemingly nonpolitical organizations, such as churches, neighborhood associations, environmental or parents groups, local food banks, and the like. Issue-publics members are “people who have made the connection between a political issue and their personal concerns” (p. 50). This personalization of politics is a key element of motivation, of what moves people to participate, at all income levels, but it is especially important in explaining variation in participation among those with the fewest resources.

Typical measures of political interest obscure and overlook the importance of motivation, issue commitments, and personal connection, focusing instead on general political knowledge and expressions of general interest. These measures might ask, for example, about knowledge of the political leanings of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, which might not be relevant to survey respondents because it is not salient for the issues these citizens care about. Characterizing these respondents as politically uninterested misses both actual and potential political participation that is issue based, not generalized. The New Orleans voters returning to vote in the election were highly motivated in spite of their lack of resources. This intense motivation drove them to overcome barriers arising from lack of resources or generalized political knowledge.

Moved to Action explores and develops this issue-publics hypothesis using multiple methods. These include chapters analyzing survey data from the American National Election Studies and the American Citizen Participation Study, as well as findings from 58 in-depth interviews from a population generated using snowball sampling and organizational references. The survey data offer support for the issue-publics hypothesis, showing that “overall, people who belong to issue publics are more likely to participate than those who do not” (p. 76) and that “the differences are particularly stark among people with less education” (p. 77).

How do people get involved in these issue-publics? The in-depth interviews reveal three key features of pathways to political action. First, values alone are not enough to motivate political action. Such values are translated into action when people have certain “triggering experiences,” going through formative events that they perceive as connecting their personal values to political action. Second, sometimes people participate for a short-term or instrumental reason (free food, to please a friend, to obtain a specific benefit) but then develop issue commitments in the course of that action that spur further political participation. Last, civic organizations make a difference in the likelihood that people will participate.

The payoff from this new analytical angle is potentially transformative for the study of political participation. Han offers a theoretical perspective that helps to explain the electoral success of the Obama campaign in 2008: The campaign focused on new participants and emphasized personal narratives in its efforts to motivate these new voters. Han also points to historical explosions of participation in the United States, and argues that the rate of participation could be much greater. This broader participation could start to unravel the vicious cycle of disadvantage that leads to the underrepresentation of poor and otherwise marginalized groups in American politics. It points to new ways to expand participation and minimize political inequality, a classic theme in American politics, particularly focusing on civil society (e.g., E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, 1960), which has been the subject of renewed attention of late (for example, Larry Bartels' recent book on inequality and representation, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2008).

This book also provides new fodder for our old debates about participation and representation, suggesting that improved participation will result in better participation. This prompts the question of whether better representation might also produce better participation. Political theorists and empirical studies have increasingly shown that the presence of women and minorities in government increases trust in government and improves citizen expectations of efficacy. Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, in Political Power and Women's Representation in Latin America (2010), argues for and finds evidence of, connections between different dimensions of representation, linking trust and feelings of efficacy to descriptive and symbolic representation, and it would be interesting to know if these improvements in representation affected the motivations that Han shows improve participation as well.

The book also speaks directly to current debates about civic decline and democracy in the United States. Many scholars have pointed to the dwindling number of, and membership in, traditional civic and fraternal organizations in the United States as part of a weakening of democracy and a hollowing out of our public sphere (see, for example, Theda Skocpol's 2003 American Political Science Association presidential address, or Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, 2000). Han finds that civic organizations are critical for overcoming other barriers to participation (such as lack of resources or information), supporting those who emphasize the critical nature of social capital in furthering participation. It would be interesting, in light of the emphasis that Skocpol puts on the old federations, and the critique that Putnam levies against “cheque-book” organizations, to find out whether certain types of organizations are more likely to advance participation. One suspects that the issue-publics argument might suggest that (counter to these narratives of decline) even mere cheque-book organizations can prompt participation by drawing connections between important issues and political action.

The in-depth interviews also offer important insights for the literature on identity formation and political mobilization in social movements. Scholars have long recognized the centrality of identity for the mobilization of social movements, but have debated as to whether identities must precede mobilization, are developed in the course of mobilization, or are a consequence of mobilization. This research reveals that for at least some people, their participation precedes their incorporation of particular values and identities as fundamental aspects of their subjectivity. They are drawn into organizations for practical social reasons, and the participation itself is an avenue of political identity formation. This critical contribution not only shows that identities are developed in the process of political action, and may well be a consequence of that political action, but also provides rich accounts of how this happens.

These findings on organizations emerge from a set of interviews, where it appears that the interviewees were selected through (at least initially) their connections with a civic organization. It would be good to know if this method of selection might be responsible for the importance of organizations in the final analysis. I suspect that the organizations would emerge as important no matter what, but it was a bit hard to tell from the description the importance of organizational ties in recruiting interviewees in the first place.

As scholars pursue the promising lines of research laid out in this book, I would sound a few notes of caution. First, it would be a shame if enthusiasm about the impact of motivation distracted us from the broader context of economic inequality that characterizes the US system, and that presents real barriers to achieving political equality. The inspiring nature of the stories of participation here made me feel as if I had to remind myself not to romanticize the struggle involved in participation for many marginalized people.

Second, although Han sometimes seemed to think of political participation as being broader than voting (as, for example, in the discussion of the Civil Rights movement), most of the analysis here implicitly or explicitly equates participation with engagement in formal political behaviors related to partisan politics, such as voting, donating to or volunteering for a campaign, attending a campaign rally, and so on. It seemed to me that having shown the importance of personal issue connections, the next step would be to join those who argue that “the personal is the political” and to recognize the many spheres and types of action that we could count as political, including protest activities (such as street theater), political literature, consciousness-raising groups, church activities, service provision in the community, and other such activities. Han provides the basis for a critique of the dominance of a narrower definition of the political.

Last, this book seems to focus on the individual level of analysis. But the concept of issue-publics is importantly a collective phenomenon—or at least has important collective dimensions. Maybe the next step might be to study issue-publics at a different level of analysis, for example, asking how they work as a form of group politics and how they connect to the state and broader political context. Are these issue-publics a distinctively American phenomenon, or does the concept travel to other national contexts? In places where many issues are highly politicized (such as Israel), would issue-publics be as important? Is it due to the poverty and depoliticization of our public space that people describe themselves as uninterested in politics in spite of being interested in many issues? Does a weak party system make these issue-publics more important? The ways in which the salience or function of issue publics is tied to the broader national context seems to me to be an area ripe for further exploration.

In short, then, Moved to Action brings new attention and ideas to bear on enduring questions, suggests new answers, and reveals the limitations to standard approaches to political participation. It is an exciting work that will get the reader thinking about new questions to ask about participation and political inequality, and the inclusion of marginalized groups in American politics.