It has become commonplace for scholars and political pundits to assert that African Americans no longer constitute a monolithic voting block, even though black voters have consistently and overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates in most electoral contests for the past 50 years. Particularly since Barack Obama's emergence on the national political stage, news agencies have featured black conservatives in a variety of contexts such that the casual observer might overestimate the percentage of African Americans who hold right-of-center views. In What's Going On? Katherine Tate embraces the difficult task of identifying the apparent shift in black public opinion and providing an explanation for its occurrence. By systematically presenting and analyzing polling data between 1970 and 2008, Tate offers a compelling explanation for the trends, arguing that they are a function of the “incorporation” of black leaders into an inherently conservative political system.

Tate's central claim is that as African Americans won crucial civil rights battles and subsequent generations became socialized into a more racially progressive social and political culture, attitudes about public policy issues have come to reflect a more moderate black political elite that operates within the political system, rather than at the periphery. The author's thesis is anchored by Robert Michels' (1911) theory of the inherently conservative and oligarchic nature of political parties, articulated in Political Parties: A Sociological Study of Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. In short, Tate argues that as black leaders moved from agitating from the margins to holding places within institutions of government, they adopted the comparatively conservative principles of the Democratic Party. In turn, African Americans began to look to black elected leaders for policy cues, which resulted in the gradual shift of black attitudes on many major public policy issues.

The bulk of the book is taken up with Tate's meticulous tracing of black political attitudes in a thematic organization, with chapters on welfare, government aid to minorities, crime, education, gay rights, immigration and the environment, and foreign policy. While theoretical grounding is present throughout, seven of the nine chapters are data-heavy revelations of the ebbs and flows of black public opinion from the American National Election Studies, General Social Surveys, and Roper Center surveys between 1970 and 2008. In most impressive fashion, Tate concocts delicious lemonade from the sometimes scarce and inconsistent lemons that she is offered from these sources.

Black public opinion has not been a primary focus of many national polling entities, and so compiling an appropriate data set for such a robust and thorough analysis is a challenging undertaking. In some places, political scientists will be empathetically frustrated by some of Tate's decisions, such as pooling data over a number of years to have a large enough sample size to make statistical inferences. While some of those choices might have been more clearly revealed (i.e., while it is clear why data are pooled, the particular groupings of years is not always intuitive), anyone who has either worked with “canned” data sets or explored the issues of race and public opinion will be impressed with the richness of what the author offers in these chapters. In fact, she adroitly uses such challenges as inconsistency in question wording and order as opportunities to discuss the important effects of survey context on public opinion data. This, of course, complicates her mission in that she must at once note that changes in opinions might very well be related to changes in question wording and order in survey instruments, while arguing that the aggregate of these shifts can be explained by her theory of black incorporation.

The glue that connects these elements is the concept of framing, which Tate invokes in both contexts. She notes that changes in the ways that public policy issues are discussed by black elected officials provide cues to African American respondents, much the same way that survey question construction can alter responses by providing differing cognitive contexts. The take-home point is that the way that we think about public policy issues affects our stated preferences for policy alternatives, and changes in political culture (broadly and within African American subsamples) affect the construction of these frames. In the case of black public opinion, Tate explains a dynamic whereby 1) the Democratic Party has gradually (though not fully) accepted black members as meaningful participants and, in some instances, as leaders; 2) black elected officials have become less radical in their stated policy preferences; and 3) black Americans have adopted the positions of (and frames offered by) black leaders.

A particularly interesting aspect of the book is a comparison of Reverend Jesse Jackson's presidential bids in 1984 and 1988 with Senator Obama's (successful) run in 2008. Tate notes that Jackson, running as a political outsider, was able to buck the establishment of the Democratic Party by advocating policies to the left of the party's leadership. Obama, on the other hand, was much more of an embodiment of Democratic Party values and policy positions, which helped him to be perceived by voters as a more mainstream political figure, despite his opponents' efforts to radicalize him. Further, between 2000 and 2008, Jackson's Democratic National Convention speeches reveal that he, too, has been accepted by, and incorporated into, the party fold in a way that serves to further reinforce black perceptions of political leaders as party insiders.

Particularly timely is Tate's treatment of Obama's candidacy and electoral success in 2008. It is often assumed that black voters supported Obama because of his race, but her analysis of black support for the Democratic Party as a whole complicates such (racist) suppositions. She notes that even as African Americans moved into elected positions in Congress as Democrats, black Americans were becoming increasingly frustrated with the party's centrist positions. However, invoking a rational-choice perspective, Tate notes that black Americans understood the Republican Party to be even further from their policy positions, and the dynamics of a two-party system ensured black support for Democrats despite a persistent gap between black public opinion and the position of the party on some key issues. Such dissonance might have persisted because of the winner-take-all nature of American electoral practices, but it was relieved as black attitudes shuffled toward the political center to more closely match the Democratic Party. The result, as illuminated in the chapters that focus on policy issues, is indeed a shift toward the political center in terms of policy preferences on some key issues, even if the upshot has not been the increased success of Republican candidates in attracting black votes.

There are not many substantive surprises in the data. Even casual observers of public opinion and minority attitudes about policy issues will find themselves nodding throughout much of the book. Tate's contribution, however, is her systematic codification of the anecdotal and experimental work in this area on a national scale and with data that span the post–Civil Rights movement era. Further, there are passages that cause an eyebrow to raise, and Tate's primary thesis is quite novel. In other words, while we already surmised that something was going on, she weaves a cohesive tapestry that is likely to serve as a touchstone for generations of political scientists interested in understanding black public opinion and political psychology.