How do gender and race interact to affect the representational behavior of all policymakers? In Race, Gender, and Political Representation, the authors answer this most timely, and intriguing question with enormous clarity and invaluable insight gleaned from intersectionality studies. At the heart of this book is a central, organizing concept: race-gender policy leadership, which signals an expressed commitment to certain groups and group interests through bill sponsorship. The moment when a state legislator takes a policy position and assumes primary responsibility for drafting a policy proposal is described in terms of agenda-setting, and issue framing within a state legislative assembly. The nuances of policy design, or rather the content of their proposal, is inextricably tied to the legislator's race-gender identity as well as their approach toward advocacy on behalf of constituents—more precisely, how legislators choose to advocate for women and minorities through bill sponsorship can be sequential as in one group's interest at a time, simultaneous as in bills that address multiple group's interest at the same time, or with greater attention to intersectional disadvantages as in bills that address the interests of subgroups within marginalized communities like poor women of color. Bill sponsorship matters insofar as it conveys legislative advocacy generally, but especially for the substantive representation of African American and Latinx women and men. Using a comparative approach to study race-gender policy leadership, the authors leverage original datasets of Democratic lawmakers and the bills they sponsor in 15 U.S. state houses from 1997 to 2005.

Disciplinary conventions in political science import a range of assumptions and truth claims that have contributed to the very erasures to which intersectionality draws attention—for example, women of color are uniquely attentive to the needs and interests of those who, like them, are multiply disadvantaged. Reingold, Haynie, and Widner revisit and reevaluate the dominant single-axis scholarship that treats race and gender as separate, mutually exclusive identities alongside a more intersectional approach. By systematically comparing the tools and products of each approach: single axis versus intersectional, the authors elucidate and showcase the ways in which women of color change the face of American politics. The consistent refrain in the data analyses about the intersection of race and gender urges readers to look beyond women and racial and ethnic minorities as monolithic groups to understand the influence of women of color in state legislative assemblies. They focus most intently and extensively on bill sponsorship as a form of policy leadership especially important for the substantive representation of African American and Latinx women and men. The authors irrefutably demonstrate the usefulness of intersectionality as an analytic tool for studying the complexities of race, gender, and representation with methodological sophistication. While attending to the behavior and impact of women of color elected officials, the authors gain new insights into the distinctive, yet varying, contributions women of color make to policy agendas. They determine how and to what extent political representation is simultaneously raced and gendered in the late 20th and early 21st century state legislatures.

Such an effort to locate this analytically rich, data-driven project informed by intersectionality studies in political science is truly laudable, as it should catalyze new theories and original models. It draws critical attention to the particularities of Black women while at the same time reveals the authors' own conceptual and methodological blind spot when the reference category for the regression analysis uses the same traditional default: white men as the baseline. They come to this measurement approach, of course, as political scientists who are not without their own views about the merits of intersectionality research when operationalizing legislator race-gender identity. Their work aims to address the question: What can a more intersectional approach reveal? While this project will not put to rest the debate set forth by skeptics about the use of quantitative methods to advance intersectional research, it will most certainly inform our thinking about long-standing questions about the impact of women of color in elected office, and open new pathways for original research.

This project traces multiple processes of representation—from electoral outcomes that determine the levels of descriptive representation, to the legislative activities that shape opportunities for substantive representation, to the policy outcomes that solidify the links between descriptive and substantive representation. Starting with the geography of representation, the book excels at replicating single-axis models and poses a formidable challenge to much of the extant literature on descriptive representation in state legislatures by determining the electoral fortunes of women of color, assuming they are constrained by political opportunity structures differently than white women especially, and their male counterparts in co-ethnic communities. Researching how intersectionality is operationalized in this way remains relatively under-explored in political science and, as a result, an additive understanding of intersectionality whereby the study of race and gender is autonomous and siloed versus interactive and mutually constitutive predominates a well-established pattern of knowledge production and social scientific inquiry in the discipline. At the same time and, no less importantly, intersectionality has become vexed by various permutations to date in the U.S. academy and treating women of color especially Black women as the preferred representative of gender and race intersections in the United States is but one way of applying intersectionality and one that has undergone much scrutiny for statically situating an essential subject in terms of identity, geography, or temporality. I do not disagree with some of the arguments and inferences put forth by the authors; however, I would be remiss not to mention that intersectionality has traveled and there is tension around intersectionality's capacity to do more than call attention to the particularities of Black women specifically and women of color generally.

Race, Gender, and Political Representation is a vitally important intervention and yet it remains beholden to disciplinary conventions and the categorical bounds of earlier work. By virtue of the painstaking methodological approach used to produce, categorize, and interpret the data, the authors' own preoccupation with difference absent a radical critique of sameness, difference, and its relationship to power in state legislatures replicates on an intellectual level the same knowledge validation process the authors critique via their comparative analysis. Emphasizing that most women of color politicians are “different” because they understand the needs of multiply disadvantaged groups in ways that others do not, and because many, if not most of them, will demonstrate a praxis orientation continues to frame whiteness outside intersectionality. Why does this matter? The answer is that it matters because unrecognized intersections underwrite many of the partisan divisions and competing policy agendas in state legislative bodies. As evidenced by their own exploration in intersectional policymaking, race-gender policy leadership lies in the ability to demonstrate how developing awareness of inequalities along multiple dimensions can inform connections across privilege as well as subordination to facilitate meaningful bipartisan collaboration and result in cross-sector legislation. Their work calls into question whether it is important for race-gender policy leadership that representatives derive their identities from their politics rather than their politics from their identities. This book should be read by state-legislative scholars, and anyone interested in how identity influences the election, behavior, and impact of state legislators. Reingold, Haynie, and Widner offer nothing less than a paradigm-shifting way to understand political representation by exposing the dynamic interplay of complex intersections of inequality and marginalization, power and privilege at work when state legislators sponsor bills.