Around the time that Arend Lijphart wrote Democracy in Plural Societies (1977), on electoral engineering and institutional design to accommodate profoundly felt cultural differences in democratic states, Crawford Young wrote The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (1976), arguing that ethnic groups are fluid and contextual. Whereas Lijphart and his intellectual descendants took “groups” for granted and focused attention on designing institutions around them, theorists of ethnic identity showed that ethnicity itself is often a product, rather than a precondition, of politics.

Over the next forty years, political scientists would go on to design not only increasingly sophisticated institutions and electoral mechanisms, but also constitutions to accommodate ethnic difference, as if those differences were not only over-determining, but permanent. And theorists of identity would go on to demonstrate that ethnic, racial, gender, and class differences often intersect to complicate both identities and interests.

Mala Htun’s book finally brings these two literatures together in a way that does justice to both. The institutions she looks at, quotas and reservations, are designed to ensure that members of historically excluded groups are elected to political office. Often, although not always, as she shows, they succeed. In Latin America, women and indigenous people in particular are now routinely elected to offices at all levels of government. But does that mean that the interests of “women” and “indigenous people” are represented and advanced in politics? No, or perhaps, not necessarily, is Htun’s answer. And part of the reason is that “women,” “indigenous people,” and also “Afrodescendants” are quite often not actually groups at all. Divided by region, class, ideology, and history, people who identify as women, indigenous, or black often do not also have a distinct set of political interests in common. That’s one reason, and I would argue the most important reason, that political inclusion does not translate easily into political representation.

Htun makes this argument in two different ways. The first few chapters of the book describe how reforms introducing quotas and reservations came into being. The influence of the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing looms large in some cases, and in others there was strong presidential support. But Htun’s real argument is that political inclusion was achieved when group members were able to unite politically to demand inclusion. The case of Bolivia is instructive here. Why, Htun asks, did the Evo Morales government, which was friendly to indigenous people but hardly feminist, pass quotas to ensure women’s inclusion in political office but fail to guarantee similar accommodations for indigenous people? The answer is that women were able to build a coalition for quotas that crossed party lines. Indigenous people were divided, mainly along regional lines that separate them historically, culturally, economically, and politically, and failed to unite behind a single plan for indigenous reservations. In another chapter she argues that women’s quotas were approved in Argentina and Mexico, but not Chile, for the same reason: because in Argentina and Mexico women organized across party lines to demand them, but in Chile they did not. Her point here is that uniting “women” or “indigenous people” politically is a political achievement, not a biological accident.

In the second half of the book, Htun turns more squarely to her fundamental argument, that inclusion does not beget representation. Here she focuses attention not on the cause of inclusion, but on its effect. Once quotas and reservations are put in place, do officials elected through them represent the interests of indigenous people, women, and Afrodescendants? Chapters on Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina make the case that by and large they do not.

In “After Quotas” Htun and her co-author argue that women’s quotas made some difference in Argentina. As women’s presence in Congress grew, both men and women were more likely to introduce legislation that affected women. But statistical evidence shows that approval rates for gender-related legislation dropped. Women, she argues, enter political office as individual members of different parties. Even if those parties include women, it is still the party that determines the success of particular pieces of legislation. Here the argument seems to be not so much that inclusion often fails to engender representation but that quotas are a particularly weak mechanism of inclusion because they divide women through the party system.

In Brazil, which has the largest population of Afrodescendants in Latin America, officials have tried to tackle historical discrimination by creating admissions quotas in public universities. But it’s been hard to measure who is eligible for admission under the quota, because the boundaries of race are much more fluid in Brazil than they are in, say, the United States. Because discrimination in Brazil is based more on class and color than race, most quotas initially took both race and class into account and, over time, class has emerged as the primary criteria of eligibility for the quota. Brazil, Htun argues, is trying to tackle discrimination through the mechanism of redistribution. Redistribution is not irrelevant, but it doesn’t solve problems rooted in discrimination.

In its widely acclaimed 1991 constitution, Colombia also attempted to address historical exclusion, in this case by creating reserved seats in the Senate and the lower house for indigenous people and “black communities.” The problem here, Htun argues, is that they went about it all wrong. They got the mechanism wrong by failing to create indigenous and Afrodescendant constituencies. Anyone could vote for candidates for those seats, which meant, effectively, that there was no real instrument to ensure that candidates had any connection to the groups they were supposed to represent. In 2014, the “black community” seats were won by two candidates who were not recognized as Afrodescendants and allegedly had ties to drug traffickers and paramilitaries.

They also got the framework wrong. If Brazil made the mistake of trying to deal with race as if it was class, Htun argues that Colombia made the mistake of trying to deal with race as if it was ethnicity. While urban Afrodescendants demanded integration and civil rights, and rural movements demanded land and protection from corporate extraction, the constitution granted rights to a few isolated “black communities” with distinct cultural practices. Ultimately the Constitutional Court ruled that Afrodescendants had rights to the extent they were ethnically distinct, not as a result of skin color. It was not until the late 2000s that Colombia started to deal explicitly with racial discrimination and equality.

The juxtaposition of these two accounts of the politics of race raises a more profound question. If race is neither class nor ethnicity, if racial discrimination cannot be resolved through redistribution or recognition, then what is it, and does it have a distinctive political framework? Htun writes as if it does, and as if that framework is objectively knowable.

But the story of Colombia belies that account. Htun describes a political situation in which rural, urban, and coastal Afrodescendants have distinct political goals that flow from distinct lived realities. In Colombia alone, Afrodescendants deploy at least three different political scripts. The one that gained traction was the one that was least threatening to entrenched political and corporate interests. But framing racial politics in the language of ethnicity was not a fundamental category error; it was just a strategy to redress one injustice experienced by one segment of the Afrodescendant population.

Like ethnicity and gender, race is not an automatic category of political identity or solidarity. Like indigenous people in Bolivia, and women in Chile, Afrodescendants in Colombia were divided—in this case by region, class, and history—in a way that impeded mobilization around a single political goal such as anti-discrimination legislation or more effective representation.

The greatest strength of Htun’s book, besides the empirical depth and richness she brings to each case, is recognizing the ways in which groups such as “women,” “Afrodescendants,” and “indigenous peoples” are constructed, and, just as often, internally divided by race, class, gender, region, history, and ideology. As a result, mechanisms that guarantee that some members of a group are elected to political office will often fail to produce representation for the interests of the group as a whole. Still, Htun says, that doesn’t mean that inclusion doesn’t matter. Even if it’s only a piece of the puzzle, we certainly won’t get to representation without inclusion. The lessons we draw from this powerful book will be a crucial part of the journey.