Diversity in Democracy is an ambitious book—even more ambitious than its subtitle suggests. Together with an impressive team of contributors, Gary Segura and Shaun Bowler set out to examine how minority Americans—blacks and Latinos, in particular—engage with the democratic political process, from how they align themselves within the existing party system to how they use the tools of democratic citizenship (namely, the vote) to advance their interests. In many ways Segura, Bowler, and their colleagues succeed and, in the process, reveal a number of important empirical phenomena and relationships, such as the value of descriptive representation in promoting both political trust and participation. Because of its contribution to basic knowledge about minority political behavior, this book would certainly be a valuable addition to any minority politics syllabus. However, its ambition is both a source of strength and a weakness.

For the reader, what begins as a rush of excitement about the sheer scope of research questions, examined by the nearly two dozen contributors, eventually gives way to frustration at the lack of a single, cohesive narrative uniting the disparate essays. While Segura and Bowler strive in their introduction to identify the common themes that unite the research, the effort requires that they define key concepts (e.g., “context”) in ways that are so broad and imprecise as to divest them of their meaning—and, hence, their ability to provide a framework for interpreting the cumulative significance of the many research findings. Moreover, the contributors are not consistently in dialogue with one another, as demonstrated by occasional failures to acknowledge points of conflict across essays. By choosing breadth or depth, and allowing their contributors considerable research discretion, Segura and Bowler have produced a book that is difficult to put down (because the research is so compelling), but that also leaves the reader asking, “What does it all add up to?”

This is, in some sense, two books. The first is concerned with the issue of minority representation—not only the mechanisms that insure the substantive representation of minority interests but also the psychological effects associated with the descriptive representation of minority Americans. In an essay that draws on more than two decades of polling data from California, Zoltan Hajnal, Elisabeth Gerber, and Hugh Louch examine how direct democracy fares as a tool for advancing a public policy agenda favorable to and favored by minority groups. The authors ask whether the initiative process systematically enables “a white majority to tyrannize a non-white minority,” with blacks, Latinos, and Asians more often than not on the losing side of direct democracy contests (p. 123). As opposed to the conventional wisdom, what they find is that minorities in fact are often on the winning side, voting with the majority on most ballot initiatives. This holds even for those initiatives that touch on (nonracial) issues known to be of particular concern to minority groups (e.g., education, crime, poverty). Yet direct democracy is not without its pitfalls. The research shows, for example, that the initiative process works against minority interests—especially Latino interests—on issues in which minority groups themselves are explicitly targeted; Proposition 209, which dismantled affirmative action in California and which was strongly opposed by a majority of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, is a classic example.

But while direct votes on race-targeted legislation clearly represent the most severe threat to minority interests, it is unclear whether the initiative process is otherwise as benign as Hajnal and his colleagues suggest. Even if white Californians rarely succeed in passing initiatives that are opposed by minorities, a fact that contributes to the authors' sanguine view of direct democracy, there is still the possibility that the policy outcomes (i.e., the status quo when the majority opposes the initiative, the new legislation when the initiative succeeds) are much closer to white Californians' mean ideal point than to the mean ideal points of nonwhite Californians. This would be evident in disparities between the sizes of the white and nonwhite majorities on proposition votes, and would in part reflect unequal access to the initiative process. White Californians may be better able than nonwhites to use the initiative process as a tool for advancing their interests and, importantly, for circumventing state legislatures where minorities have gained access; nonwhites may be more reliant on state legislatures. Surely this is a factor that should be considered when assessing whether direct democracy endangers the substantive interests of minority Americans.

With the notable exception of racially targeted initiatives, Hajnal and his colleagues demonstrate that the key to minority success in the initiative process is cohesive voting. Similarly, Bowler and Todd Donovan, in the second of four essays concerned with minority representation, find that minority political behavior determines the efficacy of cumulative voting (CV) as a mechanism for ensuring the representation of minority interests, as measured by the election of minority officeholders. On the basis of a review of 100 local elections conducted under cumulative voting systems, the authors conclude that CV can be as effective as the (increasingly unpopular) districting mechanisms typically used to promote greater minority representation. However, since the authors chose not to present any of the statistical analyses needed to support this conclusion—or to support their subsequent argument that an organized and cohesive minority vote accounts for the success of CV—it is impossible for the reader to assess the validity of their claims.

The remaining two essays on representation—one by Katherine Tate and Sarah Harsh, the second by Susan Banducci, Donovan, and Jeffrey Karp—consider how descriptive representation on the basis of race and, in the case of Tate and Harsh, gender influences the political beliefs and attitudes of constituents. Using data from the American National Election Study, the essays alternately show that when a constituent and his or her legislator are of the same race, not only is the legislator evaluated more favorably (e.g., higher approval ratings and viewed as more “in touch”), but at least some constituents also adopt a more positive orientation toward government in general and are more likely to vote. The authors succeed in highlighting a number of interesting empirical relationships—none of which are altogether new and most of which have been examined in greater depth in previous work, including in a recent book by Tate (Black Faces in the Mirror, 2003)—but they fail in offering much insight into the nature of these relationships. For example, Tate and Harsh never clarify whether the effect of descriptive representation on approval ratings reflects the operation of group stereotypes or the consequence of actual policy responsiveness. Had they attempted in their empirical analysis to address these competing hypotheses, the essay would have contributed substantially to our understanding of the significance of descriptive representation.

The latter two essays on descriptive representation, in their emphasis on how factors external to the individuals (e.g., the race or gender of their elected representative) shape their political attitudes and beliefs, touch on the second core theme contained within Diversity in Democracy: context. In four essays, Matt Barreto and Nathan Woods, Rodney Hero and Caroline Tolbert, Carol Uhlaner and Chris Garcia, and Martin Johnson and Stacy Gordon reveal the ways in which attitudes and beliefs are influenced by various aspects of the political and social environment in which individuals live. Hero and Tolbert examine how perceptions of political efficacy among whites and nonwhites vary with the racial and ethnic diversity and the frequency of ballot initiatives in a state. While the theoretical motivation for their expectations regarding the effects of diversity are never made entirely clear, Hero and Tolbert hypothesize that insofar as direct democracy is systematically biased in favor of a white majority over a nonwhite minority, in states that make frequent use of the initiative process nonwhites should exhibit lower political efficacy and whites a greater sense of political efficacy. In fact, they find no significant direct effects associated with either diversity or direct democracy—the latter a result that Hajnal and his colleagues likely would find unsurprising given the frequency with which minorities are on the winning side of initiative outcomes. What Hero and Tolbert do not explore empirically, however, is how diversity and direct democracy interact to shape perceptions of efficacy, and to do so in ways that differ across racial and ethnic groups. Whether whites take comfort in direct democracy may depend on whether nonwhites constitute a (voting) population large enough to determine initiative outcomes. Although Hero and Tolbert use the language of conditional effects throughout their essay, they ultimately test models that do not allow for such effects.

In contrast to Hero and Tolbert—as well as to Barreto and Woods, who link heightened Latino participation in Los Angeles County in the 1990s to the campaigns against three divisive ballot initiatives—Uhlaner and Garcia as well as Johnson and Gordon focus their attention on the social environment as an influence on political attitudes and orientations. In both essays, the racial and ethnic composition of individuals' social networks—the people with whom they live, work, and worship—is shown to have a significant influence on partisan identification among Latinos and blacks. Individuals who are more culturally integrated into their respective racial and ethnic communities—African Americans who socialize primarily with other African Americans, Latinos who socialize primarily with other members of their national origin group—are more likely to adopt their group's prevailing partisan norms, which are Democratic partisanship for blacks and Mexican Americans, Republican for Cubans. In their view of partisanship as a social identity, one whose salience depends in part on whether it is reinforced in everyday encounters, the essays are interesting. (And the perspective they offer differs markedly from that offered by Stephen Nicholson and Segura who, in their essay on the determinants of Latino partisanship, argue that it is the parties' records on the issues most salient to Latinos that is responsible for the persistence of Democratic identification among non-Cuban Latinos.) However, to the extent that the authors fail to take seriously issues of endogeneity, it is difficult to say what conclusions we can draw from the observed empirical relationships. Perhaps it is not that racially homogenous social networks reinforce partisanship, but rather that individuals with minority views (e.g., black Republicans) opt for more diverse networks, aware of the cool reception they can expect from most in-group members. Johnson and Gordon raise the possibility that selection effects may account for the correlation between partisanship and cultural integration among blacks, but then proceed with a statistical analysis that assumes such effects do not exist, a sure recipe for bias. More troubling still is the authors' use of causal language in discussing the results and in speculating on their implications for long-term trends (e.g., declining residential segregation and its supposed effect on black partisanship).

The ambition that distinguishes Diversity in Democracy results inevitably from the collaborative efforts of a large, intellectually diverse and talented group of scholars. Freedom Is Not Enough, the new book by Ronald Walters, is ambitious by design. Walters takes the fortieth anniversary of the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) as an opportunity to reflect on how, and how successfully, African Americans have used the tools of the VRA—chief among them, the vote—to enhance their political power. Unlike many other scholarly treatments of post-VRA black politics, where attention so often is trained only on issues of minority districting and the election of black officeholders at the state and local level, Walters's book is focused instead on the ability of a cohesive and mobilized black electorate to influence national politics, presidential elections in particular. From the author's perspective, the significance of the VRA for black empowerment rests in its reaffirmation of the guarantees of the Fifteenth amendment and in its efforts to dismantle all obstacles to the free exercise of the vote. Across six presidential elections (from 1984 to 2004) and eight chapters, Walters describes how African Americans have made strategic use of the vote in their bid to move from mere freedom to full, meaningful citizenship.

Walters begins with a discussion of Jesse Jackson's presidential bids in 1984 and 1988, a discussion which will be familiar to anyone who has read his earlier accounts of these campaigns in Black Presidential Politics in America (1989). Walters's active involvement in the Jackson campaigns—particularly the 1984 bid—is evident in the anecdotes that add color to the chapter. The emphasis on the Jackson campaigns is an effort to illustrate the “leverage politics” model—defined by a mobilized and mobile black vote, organized and “controlled” by blacks themselves—that the author contends has been key to African Americans' success in advancing their political and policy interests. As evidence of the model's success in 1984 and 1988, he points to Jackson's influence on the final Democratic Party platform and the eventual integration of key members of Jackson's campaign staff into the leadership of the party. Sadly, what Walters does not discuss are actual policy outcomes. (He does observe that Bill Clinton later consulted with Jackson on affirmative action policy and that Jackson served as an adviser to the president on Africa, two facts that demonstrate only the success of leverage politics in advancing Jackson's own career.)

Walters's central argument is not simply that leverage politics is an effective strategy, but that it does not depend for its success on the presence of a black presidential candidate. (In fact, his case studies of the Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton candidacies in 2004 demonstrate quite clearly that charismatic black presidential candidates are neither necessary nor sufficient.) In Chapters 3 through 7, Walters discusses the key role of the “black political infrastructure”—churches, advocacy groups, black media—in the mobilization of the black electorate. It is the ability of these organizations to register African Americans, to educate them about their choices and build consensus, and to get them to the polls that determines the bargaining power of the black vote. He chronicles, arguably in too much detail, the actions of these groups in the 1992–2004 elections. The discussion is a refreshing departure from journalistic accounts of black presidential politics that tend to overstate the importance of singular personalities or spokespersons. It is clear that the maintenance of this infrastructure will continue to be essential to the quest for meaningful citizenship.

But while Walters does not view the current absence of viable black presidential candidates as itself a threat to the ability of African Americans to use their vote to secure favorable political outcomes, he does see other threats to black political power lurking on the horizon. The 2000 election debacle, as well as irregularities in 2004, exposed electoral practices that undermine the strength of the black vote. He points, for example, to felony disenfranchisement laws that have staggeringly disproportionate effects on African Americans (e.g., 31% of the black male population in Florida face lifetime voting bans). After an exhaustive review of practices, legal and illegal, that serve as barriers to effective black participation, and of proposed reforms that, he claims, fail to adequately address these barriers, Walters argues for the need for measures that will strengthen the VRA (as well as the recently passed Help America Vote Act). At stake are African Americans' hard won political gains and their continuing ability to advance an agenda that meets the social and economic needs of their community. Freedom without power is not enough.