Like Sherlock Holmes, Adam Seth Levine is puzzled by the dog that did not bark. In Levine’s case, the “dog” is a large segment of the American public whose lives are financially precarious. Millions of Americans find it very difficult to save for retirement, afford health care, sustain themselves when unemployed, or pay for their children to attend college, and yet these same Americans are poorly organized and weakly represented. Why do these people not become more involved in politics? Why are they not pushing the government harder to make their lives less insecure? Part of the answer, according to the author, is that efforts to mobilize these people by emphasizing their insecurity can backfire. Many of these individuals might respond by conserving their scarce resources, focusing on what they and their families need in the short run, rather than by becoming politically active and potentially helping themselves in the long run. Thus, at a general level, Levine wants to understand how political rhetoric can create psychological barriers to collective action.

The first half of American Insecurity is clear and concise, but offers few surprises to a scholarly audience. (Undergraduates, however, might find these chapters more useful.) Chapter 1 nicely locates this study in the context of several scholarly literatures without getting bogged down in the details of previous studies. The author also offers a few quick examples of what he calls “self-undermining rhetoric” to demonstrate the plausibility and potential scope of his broader argument. He shows in Chapter 2 that many Americans do view retirement, health care, unemployment, and college costs as serious financial threats. Evidence from multiple Gallup polls indicates that these concerns routinely rank high on the list of the most important problems facing the country. On the basis of data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), Levine finds, not surprisingly, that these concerns are usually stronger among individuals who are facing financial insecurities in their own lives.

Chapter 3 reviews familiar trends in interest groups, political parties, and campaigns. While broad-based groups (e.g., labor unions) have declined over the last half century, more specialized citizen groups have grown in number and influence. Hardly any groups focus on all the major sources of insecurity, meaning that individuals who desire change must work issue by issue, joining a health-care group to improve their health insurance coverage, a senior citizen group to improve their retirement pensions, and so on. Levine pays less attention to parties and campaigns, primarily because he views elections as crude mechanisms for citizens to register their specific policy concerns. Nevertheless, he notes that political parties and individual candidates still rely on ordinary citizens to work in campaigns and contribute money.

The more intriguing parts of the argument appear in the second half of American Insecurity. Between 2008 and 2012, Levine conducted several survey experiments and one field experiment to understand how people respond to participation requests from interest groups and nonprofit organizations. In particular, he wanted to know how people respond when those requests mentioned financial concerns, compared to when they did not. Most of the experiments involved college education or health care. One of the clear strengths of this book is the effort Levine made to ensure that these experiments were as realistic as possible. Participants were asked whether they would contribute time or money to well-established organizations (e.g., American Cancer Society, U.S. PIRG), not hypothetical ones; and the participants were given a small sum of money at the start of three of these experiments, which they could later use to make a donation to that organization or keep for themselves.

The results of these experiments indicate that issue framing can affect individuals’ willingness to become politically involved. To his credit, Levine does not overstate his results, which sometimes reveal little to no effect. Among the more notable findings: Individuals were usually less likely to donate money to an organization when cost issues were highlighted than when given only general information about that organization; decisions to donate time were influenced both by issue framing and by whether individuals were currently employed; “the people most sensitive to health care–related insecurity . . . were the least likely to engage in political action that sought to reduce health care costs” (p. 161); and individuals with modest resources sometimes behaved very differently than did more affluent individuals, whose willingness to contribute actually increased when told about costs.

Personally, I found the health-care experiments to be more informative than the education experiments. Instead of a national sample of adults, the latter relied on students from “a prestigious public university in which the median household income for undergraduates greatly exceeded the national average” (p. 127). Both their young age and their high incomes left me wondering whether they experience financial insecurity and decide how to allocate their own time and money in a manner similar to the insecure Americans described at the start of the book. The education experiments focus on the cost of textbooks, not tuition, and yet tuition is by far the more daunting expense. Moreover, of the four sources of insecurity, paying for college appears to worry Americans much less than unemployment; ideally, at least one experiment would have asked about jobs. Few of my concerns will likely surprise the author, who recognizes that his limited resources as a researcher led him to make some difficult trade-offs.

Because his experiments focused on just two sources of economic insecurity and on a few forms of political participation, Levine returns to the ANES in Chapter 6. These data allow him to test more generally whether those who consider financial insecurity to be a pressing national issue are also the same people who are less active in politics. The basic answer is “yes” with respect to donating money to campaigns, parties, and interest groups, and “not really” with respect to attending public meetings or volunteering in campaigns. The author also shows that people who believe insecurity is a pressing issue hold somewhat different policy preferences—favoring a bigger role for government—than those people who believe that other issues are more pressing.

Overall, I admire American Insecurity for several reasons. The author is quite transparent about his assumptions and procedures, and his writing is to the point and jargon free. The main findings (in Chapters 5 and 6) should interest academics and should give parties and interest groups insights into mobilizing citizens more effectively. Finally, Levine has found a way to explain nonparticipation in politics besides indifference, alienation, or abject poverty. The people at the heart of this book are trying hard to sustain their standard of living, and harping on their financial insecurities is not likely to make them engage more with politics. That sort of mindset does not make them small-minded or self-centered, in my view; it makes them human.