Rather than a rebuttal, I offer a confession. Mostly this is because Elaine B. Sharp's assessment is both fair and precise. As she notes, there is a big gulf between our book's rather grandiose theory of electoral politics and its subsequent empirical tests. After making some sweeping hypotheses about the role of size, scope, and bias as the primary determinants of electoral politics across all types of democracies, our empirical analysis tested only a limited range of values and cases. While my colleagues and I hope that our theoretical framework will prove useful for future comparative electoral studies, our book does not provide a definitive test.

Sharp is also right that the concept of bias is inherently endogenous and problematically operationalized. While it may be self-evident that the malapportionment of a democracy's resources will influence its politics, finding measures of such bias, it turns out, is quite difficult. Even more important, she brings up a valid criticism we had inexcusably overlooked: that a local democracy's racial composition can influence its electoral politics more for existential than material reasons. While we focused on racial composition as an indicator of resource bias, Sharp reminds us that it also invokes nonmaterial matters of identity.

We are left with the confession: Many of these gaps are due to the way in which the book was written. Like most empirical political science, this research was more inductive than deductive. It started largely as an open-ended exploration of local, suburban elections. The few theories we had came largely from studies of national elections. So, when we were not asking open-ended questions, we were looking at partisanship, issues, and candidate charisma. It was only after collecting and analyzing our data that we realized how inappropriate these variables were. We then faced a choice: either to construct a narrow set of theories that were specific to suburbs or to think about how suburban elections systematically vary from other jurisdictions. We chose the latter, and once we began comparing local, state, and national elections, we ended up with our big theory.

At this point, a more patient scholar might have gone out, collected more data, and generated some better hypothesis tests. We, however, were not so patient, mostly because we found this theoretical framework to be so compelling. Comparing local, state, and national politics in terms of size, scope, and bias yielded a trove of new insights. It allowed us to reasonably question whether low voter turnout is the civic blight we so often assume. It allowed us to appreciate why incumbents fare better in some jurisdictions than in others. And it allowed us to appreciate why local politics seem so tranquil and how this tranquility can mask political conflict across a wider metropolitan area.

So rather than wait several years, we made the best of the data that were available. We hope that scholars of both electoral and local politics will find our theoretical framework useful, and we look forward to future research that tests our hypotheses more rigorously.