Stephen Coleman approaches voting in a decidedly unique and refreshing manner in this new text. Rather than focusing on the aggregated and easily quantifiable aspects of the act of voting, in How Voters Feel, he instead wades into the murky waters of affect and experience, aiming for a more nuanced, holistic understanding of voting. In his own words, he seeks to “challenge accounts of democracy that undervalue the vitality of affect” (p. 8). Obviously, endeavoring to complete such a project in 280 pages is ambitious, but, for the most part, Coleman rises admirably to this challenge.

In order to understand the rarely probed “feeling of voting” and get at the “knotty tensions” contained within that experience (p. 2; p. 17), Coleman utilizes interviews. Specifically, his conclusions are drawn from research completed as part of the Road to Voting Project, which was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (p. ix). Given the author’s subject matter and his desire to understand the experience of voting—treating it “as if there is nothing well understood, obvious, and ingrained about the concept” (p. 8)—interviews offer the flexibility to engage in such an investigation. In addition to the interview material, Coleman draws on a wide variety of empirical, theoretical, and normative work to make his arguments. It is not often that you see cutting-edge, quantitative American politics scholarship quoted side by side with philosophical work on the meaning and performance of democracy. Thus, one strength of this work is in bringing these divided literatures together toward a common goal.

How Voters Feel is distinct from typical electoral studies fare in both its approach and its structure. The preface and first two chapters serve to frame and introduce the inquiry to take place. The five substantive chapters that follow utilize the interview material to explore various aspects of the voting experience, such as memory, the complex act of being represented, and the constitution and nature of the space where voting occurs. The lengthy final chapter strives to unite the thematic nature of the intermediary chapters with the broader initial pursuit and also to provide concrete prescriptions regarding how to move forward with this new knowledge of voting as a “cultural act—a performance through which something called the public makes itself known” (p. 194).

It is in this final chapter where Coleman makes his most interesting assertion: positing a connection between the observed deficiencies of democratic practice of which we are all aware and the failure to honor the true affective and cultural nature of political participation highlighted in his text. He then offers prescriptions for ways to improve the democratic experience beyond oft-peddled mechanical suggestions, such as increasing convenience and deliberation. Thus, he concludes strongly by showing not only how his work provides a more accurate depiction of voting, improving our understanding as scholars and political actors, but also how having such an understanding can enrich the quality and diversity of democracy itself.

As mentioned, this book possesses a unique structure. Readers seeking the traditional format of most empirical electoral texts will be disappointed. Coleman does not provide a succinct introductory chapter framing the investigation and setting forth the customary roadmap of theory, data and methodology, results, and conclusion. His work is more integrative and less focused on methods. The introduction to the work unfurls over the course of the first two chapters. The subsequent chapters are substantive and intensive. This is not a book you read piecemeal, but, instead, like many an album, is meant to be consumed whole. It would be difficult to fully understand the findings and meaning of his project without doing so.

Coleman vacillates between presenting his work as a complement to existing work on voting and condemning other works for being shortsighted and limited in scope. How Voters Feel challenges much existing scholarship, forcing us to consider other ways of understanding what it means to vote. However, at times Coleman strikes a more ambitious, and insistent, tone, contrasting his successes with the failings of those who have come before, particularly questioning the primarily quantitative focus in the study of elections. He asserts that “there surely is a sense in which the act of voting as described in most election studies is stripped of its cultural vitality, leaving the individual voters as a disembodied cog in a vast political counting machine” (p. viii). After stating that his study is the only one ever to ask people how it feels to vote, he denounces the preoccupation with the scientific study of voting, saying it is “as if the fullness of the democratic process is best captured through the cold measurement of numbers rather than the torrid excavation of messy affects” (p. 8).

While surely written to provoke, the author’s condemnation is not entirely fair to political science. The rise of the study of affect, especially in Coleman’s field of political communication, is notable in recent years. Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, it might have been more helpful to speculate what, specifically, is missed in those other studies that do not wade into the vagaries of affect. Such an analysis would allow future scholars to evaluate whether their projects require delving into the individual experience of voting or not.

Coleman could thus do a much better job of carefully situating his work in the literature. In the same way, while he usefully challenges scholars to think beyond statistics alone, his text has some methodological problems of its own. Coleman extensively discusses the philosophical and validity-based concerns of a project such as this one, but fails to provide a detailed description of the methodology utilized to conduct the interviews that are his primary evidence. At no point does he disclose the location of the interviews (there is a vague statement about the interviews being conducted “in and around a single northern English city” [p. 99]), the interview protocol, or the number of interviews conducted. Because of this lack of information, readers will be unable to fully appraise the quality of the qualitative research conducted or its potential to be applied elsewhere. While the author might find the insistence upon such details to be symptomatic of the entrenchment of quantification in political science, provision of this information is necessary if he hopes to convince the community at large that his assertions and findings have implications beyond the one city in England that he chose to study.

Despite these weaknesses, I believe that this book represents a successful challenge to conventional wisdom in scholarship on voting. While it does not provide any sweeping or shocking conclusions, it does force those who study elections, especially in a purely aggregate, statistical manner, to question what they are missing by doing so. Coleman makes important strides in this work by challenging scholars to think about voting in a much more expansive and culturally meaningful manner. Voting is not merely the expression of preference; it is a process with many actors, influences, and motivations—all of which must be considered when trying to assess the nature and quality of voting in a democracy.