Scholarship that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines must access diverse literatures and adjudicate conflicting claims, and often reconcile different languages and standards of evidence. Robert Bennett's book attempts all of this in an original but flawed explanation for the distinctive shape of government in the United States.

A primary idiosyncrasy in this work is equating “conversation” with virtually every form of political communication, consisting “mostly of communication to varied segments of the citizenry from candidates for public office, government officials, and media” (p. 2). In Bennett's view, such talk is conversational in that officials and media often take into account the passive listener's interests when crafting their messages. As a political communication scholar, I find it difficult to overcome the shock of this misfit metaphor, given that deliberative and participatory accounts of democracy have revived interest in the importance of actual political conversation.

Bennett argues that existing models provide an incomplete and clumsy accounting of the United States government, and he offers a “conversational account” to answer a series of puzzling questions. Why does the public passively accept the inequitable allocation of two U.S. senators to each state, despite tremendous variation in the populations therein? Why, if we draw districts based on total population, has there been almost no discussion of the idea that children's votes could be allocated to their parents? Why do some legal observers continue to view the practice of judicial review as problematic? And why do people vote, despite the lack of a rational motivation to do so?

One difficulty Bennett may have is convincing readers that these are problematic features of American government, let alone particularly important ones. When he introduces each problem, well-documented or commonsense explanations come quickly to mind, such as the distinctive historical context in which the bicameral congressional model emerged as an expedient compromise. Moreover, these four puzzles do not amount to a paradigm-threatening string of anomalies. In each case, he overstates the gravity of the problem, acknowledges the preexisting, straightforward explanations for them, then quickly dismisses these simple accounts and diverts attention to a contrast between the conversational account and a specific rival model.

For the first three puzzles, Bennett introduces the “vote-centered model,” which seeks to explain all American political institutions, practices, and debates as expressions of an unwavering commitment to simple majority rule. For instance, the majoritarian model cannot explain why the public and academics quietly accept the Senate's unequal districts despite their violation of the principle of equal voting power. If this country is built solely on majoritarian principles, he argues, there should be some periodic outcry: “Even if the Constitution requires us to live with a ‘defective’ Senate, that is no barrier to the expression of dissatisfaction about senatorial apportionment” (p. 51).

The conversational approach, according to the author, can explain why there is little objection to this unique arrangement. Having stable and powerful statewide districts serves to promote more “conversation”—that is, media coverage of elections and direct voter contacts by candidates. Such mass communication is valued because it promotes social cohesion, general satisfaction, and involvement in politics. By engaging citizens in “conversation,” officials and candidates make them feel as though they have been taken seriously, their needs and values duly noted. Thus, our institutions are designed, in part, to foster the production of political messages for general public consumption.

For the fourth puzzle, Bennett contrasts rational choice theory with the conversational explanation. This is a convenient juxtaposition because rational choice—a model that he views as a powerful complement to his own—is one of the only general models that finds turnout perplexing. If one rejects the conceptual contortions that define away altruistic and other nonrational motivations, rational choice theory remains puzzled by a citizen expending the effort to cast a ballot that is unlikely to be of any consequence, the recent experience of Floridians notwithstanding.

The problem is that compelling explanations already exist, including the push of civic duty and the pull of high-intensity campaign communications. Bennett recognizes both of these and repackages them as a conversational explanation: Election messages promote a sense of belongingness and involvement that, in turn, lead to voting. This move is problematic, however, because works such as Joseph Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Spiral of Cynicism (1997) provide strong evidence that campaign and media messages can just as often dampen efficacy and turnout. Moreover, civic duty does not rise and fall with campaign intensity. Quite the contrary, it is an enduring social psychological phenomenon, often passed from one generation to the next.

The greatest virtue of Talking It Through may be its noble ambition to add a new and powerful explanation to those we already use to make sense of American jurisprudence and elections. Bennett also contributes to the ongoing epistemological debate in the social sciences by articulating a clear justification for developing partial explanatory accounts, as opposed to seeking only universal predictive models. The book also directs readers' attention to the interesting question of whether to count children (and adults without voting rights) when drawing up local, state, and federal districts.

Unfortunately, errors and omissions limit the book's overall value. In particular, Bennett overstates the degree to which normative and empirical democratic theorists foreground the majoritarian, vote-centered conception of democracy. For instance, deploying Joseph Bessette's The Mild Voice of Reason (1994) as a chief illustration of this view misses the central thesis of that work, which is that democracy depends on sober legislative deliberation that can rise above more base electoral pressures. Equating democracy with the simple rule of the majority is a gross error, indeed, but this error is committed with great regularity only by unsophisticated citizens, angry mobs, and abridged dictionaries.

Bennett's quest for a theory that traverses history, law, political science, and communication theory shows considerable bravery, for any such odyssey must encounter reviewers from each of the various disciplines it invokes. In the interest of creating robust interdisciplinary work, one can only hope that social scientists who venture into Bennett's more familiar legal territory will face as demanding a review as has been attempted here.