Leighley takes on the task of a careful review, comparison, and integration of the various literatures that have analyzed racial and ethnic political participation, including those based on historical and analytic case studies of racial and ethnic political participation, and on survey research of individuals drawn from specific racial and ethnic groups. She then compares the findings in these studies with assumptions based in rational choice models of voter turnout and collective action. She readily acknowledges that since “collective action is fairly common” (p. 7), some consideration of extra individual factors is required.

The author examines three types of contextual influences that reduce costs and/or increase benefits: elite mobilization (efforts by elites to engage political activity), relational goods (incentives enjoyed by members of groups), and racial and ethnic context (the composition of the individual's context, which she interprets as the size of the group). She then uses her assumptions to model mobilization of racial and ethnic groups by political elites, using several data sets, and to compare her findings with previous literature. The data sets are two national surveys and two Texas-based surveys. She uses the American National Election Study from 1956 through 1996, and the Citizen Participation Study conducted by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995), which oversampled black and Latino political activists on their participation skills, to which Leighley added political empowerment evidence. She also used her own Texas Minority Survey (conducted with Vedlitz, 1999), a public-opinion telephone survey that also oversampled African Americans, Mexican Americans and Asian Americans. Finally she draws upon the Texas County Party Chairs Survey; this telephone survey queried Texas Democratic and Republican party officials about their efforts at mobilizing voters.

Leighley's comparison of different approaches toward understanding racial and ethnic mobilization is an enjoyable innovation for rational choice analysis, one which allows for a clearer understanding of the strengths and limits of the different literatures, and there are important ones that frame and limit the significance of some of the author's findings. She has clearly broadened the assumptions of rational choice since she explores the importance of group-based variables, framed in terms of contextual variables. Since she is using a rational choice theoretical framework, she tends to limit her exploration for understanding the meaning of context more than she should. For example, she treats the political dynamics under examination as if they were largely a twentiethcentury, even a late-twentieth-century, phenomenon. Her discussion of the political and institutional issues associated with African Americans refers primarily to the very recent past and to segregation, but never to slavery and its powerful impact on American political history, society, and institutions, including those of Texas (p. 127). Similarly, Latinos experienced a complex range of forces, including the Mexican-American War and the subsequent expropriation of land by Anglos. It is, of course, highly problematic to define the impact of these forces quantitatively, but they shape American society even in contemporary politics. Taking note of them is an important way of acknowledging some of the limitations of data analysis, whether in surveys or in models of white, African American, and Latino participation and mobilization.

A variety of conceptual issues also affect the analyses. First, while acknowledging Latino diversity, Leighley tends to de-emphasize the complexity of the Latino population, perhaps because of her use of Texas-based surveys. She might have addressed this by using data from the Latino National Political Surveys, which distinguished Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexican Americans, in her own analysis. Race is also somewhat problematic since she does not address the issue of racial differences among Latinos. That issue, framed by the U.S. Census as “Latinos may be of any race,” is also an important underlying distinction in the way in which Latinos tend to see the world, and it may in time begin to have an impact on race-based American politics. Second, she defines “mobilization” as public officials reaching out to racial and ethnic groups, and she assumes it occurs. Within the racial and ethnic literature, most studies emphasize the work of racial and ethnic civic-mobilizing institutions at encouraging participation. This literature finds little mobilization of racial and ethnic groups by party or elected officials. Finally, the author's definitions of contextual variables are, because of their rational choice framework, overly narrowly defined. Relational goods, drawn from Carole Uhlaner, are oriented toward the organizational and institutional networks of racial and ethnic groups. Leighley fails to recognize the differences that inhere in these spaces: “[b]ecause involvement in civic institutions [i.e., workplace, church, and voluntary associations] is not necessarily structured by race” (p. 104). There are significant and complex differences in how groups attach to and are involved in institutions.

There are also important issues with the data sets Leighley employs. A number of other surveys might also have been incorporated, as comparisons. The National Election Study has long been debated as an appropriate source of data on the opinions of racial and ethnic groups. Data from Patricia Gurin, Shirley Hatchett, and James Jackson's National Black Election Studies (Hope and Independence 1989), and Michael Dawson's National Black Politics Study (Behind the Mule 1994), and Rodolfo de la Garza et al.'s Latino National Political Survey (Latino Voices 1993) might have been used. The Survey of Texas Party Chairs was an intriguing study on efforts at mobilizing various racial and ethnic groups. Leighley assumes they responded accurately. Her survey instrument confirms that they were asked to give information on their racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic background, but there is no discussion of the results in the text. Since she verifies survey respondents’ reports of how they are contacted with county party officials’ reports of their efforts to mobilize, it is vital to know more about their demographic and ideological characteristics.

Strength in Numbers? offers important and provocative findings, and it emphasizes contextual factors in understanding racial and ethnic political participation and mobilization. Leighley's innovative work is a welcome exploration of the subject matter across differing methodologies. The long-term political implications of her findings that racial and ethnic groups, including Anglos, are more likely to respond positively to mobilization when they reside in homogeneous environments will generate further debate and rich discussions in which a variety of scholars will want to participate.