A central claim of my book is that inclusion and representation are distinct political projects and distinct normative goods. Improving the political presence of excluded groups is one important democratic goal; advancing the representation of their interests is another. Yet many activists and advocates, and much of the literature, have treated inclusion and representation as sequentially and causally related. People still tend to believe that the political presence of members of an excluded group will make it more likely that the interests of members of that group will be advanced.

My book argues that inclusion often doesn’t lead to representation. Jung, in her astute review, proposes that the diversity of groups is the main reason. An intellectual heir to constructivist tradition in ethnic politics emanating from Crawford Young, Jung stresses the role of politics in crafting group boundaries and, by extension, group identities. As she put it in a different piece:

Since group composition and group identities change in response to different historical and political projects, the interests that group members have in common also change.

My book, as Jung points out, also owes its inspiration to the legacy of Arend Lijphart and his quest to engineer institutions well. Lijphart believed that we can and should design institutions to correspond to the character and distribution of social groups.

Much of my work on the comparative politics of gender, race, and ethnicity has sought to explore the similarities and differences among social groups, and to inquire as to whether or not each group possesses characteristics that imply a particular scheme for inclusion and representation. As I argued in my 2004 article in this journal, ^{Footnote 2} it is not groups like women or indigenous peoples per se that functionally require particular mechanisms. Rather, the key question is how group characteristics in certain historical and social contexts align with existing political institutions. Groups that cross cut parties do better with candidate quotas; groups that coincide with party divisions do better with reserved seats in parliament.

I am a constructivist, but not all the way down. In contrast to Jung, I believe there are variations in the degree to which groups are constructed. For example, there is a biological component to the sex traits on which gender has been built. Sex differences are functional insofar as they enable human life to reproduce. Many societies have interpreted these differences in binary ways and fashioned them into gender roles and gendered meanings. Race” has no such analogue. There is nothing biologically functional about racial identities, or ethnic, religious, and class identities.

Jung’s review poses the question of what race is, and whether groups defined by race have an objectively knowable framework to advance their demands on the state.

Colson Whitehead also considers the issue of the nature of racialized groups in his National Book Award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad. As the character Lander explains to the residents of Valentine Farm—a diverse mix of runaway slaves, freemen, and northern abolitionists—during a community assembly:

Lander concludes: “Color must suffice. It has brought us to this night, this discussion, and it will take us into the future…we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family.” ^{Footnote 4}

Whitehead and Jung agree that what racialized groups have in common is history: a history of social positioning, and often exclusion and violence, based on skin color. The shared interests brought about by “race” derive from this history. As Jung (and others, such as Lisa Baldez ^{Footnote 5} ) have shown, the denial of rights by race, political exclusion by gender, and discrimination along the lines of ethnicity invest those categories with meaning as political identities.

But at the next stop along the historical road, if groups have gained some relief from discrimination or oppression, their internal differences become more visible. The Valentine Farm in Whitehead’s novel was, at least temporarily, a safe space that created a context for diversity—which had always been there—to return to prominence. Though residents shared an oppressive past, they had different views and visions for their future. Exclusion tends to unite; empowerment often divides.

The crucial function of representative institutions is to provide a framework for both inclusion and contestation in the context of diversity, as Dahl pointed out almost 50 years ago. ^{Footnote 6} Merely getting members of excluded groups into positions of power does not begin to solve the problem of how to aggregate, and translate, their variety of interests and perspectives into legitimate public choices.