In this book, Catherine M. Paden examines five major civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League (NUL), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—and explains why they chose to represent low-income African Americans during the antipoverty debates of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s. She also analyzes their political responses to the Hurricane Katrina crisis in New Orleans. Paden's impressive archival research into these groups, supplemented by interviews with leaders and activists, allows her to assess these organizations' level of advocacy on behalf of the poor.

Paden begins by stating her contribution to the existing scholarly literature: “[W]hile scholars have studied the civil right movement extensively, few have examined an organization's attention to anti-poverty policy, and none has assessed why groups chose to give priority to an issue that was secondary to their missions” (p. 4). Her case studies focus on periods when identity-based groups chose to represent the interests of subpopulations of their larger constituencies. She concludes that national Civil Rights organizations advocate on behalf of the poor when they have incentives to do so. Organizational decisions to represent the poor are sometimes strategic, sometimes based on an ideological commitment, and sometimes both. Paden concludes that choices are never purely ideological: Groups are aware of strategy and of their positions within their issue niche when they decide their policy priorities. Her findings suggest that both internal structural factors, such as a Civil Rights organization's relationship with its local office, and external factors, such as a group's relationship with other Civil Rights organizations, determined priorities.

On the basis of multiple case studies, Paden examines Civil Rights organizations and their decisions about whether to represent the poor during six legislative periods (1960–63; 1964–65; 1966–68; 1969–72; 1994–98) of welfare reform, and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina (2005–08). If Paden's goal is to explain variation across groups as well as variation across time on antipoverty advocacy, it is unclear why she selects five cases from the 1960s and early 1970s and then ignores the rest of the decade, as well as the entire Reagan-George H. W. Bush years. Chapters 3 thru 6 highlight a tremendous amount of archival work to render a simple conclusion: Civil Rights organizations varied in their attention to antipoverty policy during the early and mid-1960s. If, as Paden argues, a case study of organizational behavior during the 1960s Civil Rights movement is an “exceptional case,” it would seem even more important to select additional antipoverty policy cases from the late 1970s and the 1980s. Moreover, if Richard Nixon's “new federalism” and Reagan's assault on the welfare state are key developments in contemporary social policy in the United States, her jump from 1972 to 1994 raises case-selection issues, resulting in a serious missed opportunity.

Paden's final empirical chapter (8) explores Civil Rights organizations' varied responses to the “needs of the poor” during the 1996 welfare reform debate—when the New Deal's Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced with Transitional Aid to Needy Families (TANF)—and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina between 2005 and 2008. It is clear from her introductory chapter—on antipoverty as a Civil Rights issue—that Hurricane Katrina's spotlight on African American poverty was an important motivation for her research. She acknowledges that Hurricane Katrina is not a representative case of welfare policy alone, justifying its selection by claiming that “the sudden national attention to race and poverty presented civil rights advocacy organizations with a unique opportunity … [A]ny analysis of advocacy on behalf of low-income African-Americans would be remiss if it neglected such a significant moment in recent history” (p. 136).

On the basis of her analyses of these two additional moments, Paden argues that the two major remaining Civil Rights organizations, NAACP and NUL, varied in the levels of attention they devoted to issues affecting low-income African Americans during the mid-1990s and in response to Katrina, but neither devoted a high level of attention to such activities. Perhaps even more interesting, though receiving of far less attention from Paden, is the dramatic shrinking of the number of Civil Rights organizations over the past 40 years and the implications of this change for the political representation of African Americans at the local and national levels. The author continues with her analysis of internal and external factors and how they shaped the remaining Civil Rights groups' formulation of priorities.

In terms of answering one of her original questions—how Civil Rights interest groups choose their priorities—Paden offers some important insights regarding their attention to antipoverty policies, mostly during the Kennedy-Johnson and early Nixon eras, and some additional conclusions about how the only two remaining Civil Rights organizations responded to recent challenges in the 1990s. It would have been very helpful for her to expand a bit on how these findings are applicable to other policy issues and time periods, and more importantly, how these findings apply to other groups and their decisions on whether or not to advocate on behalf of other subpopulations. Let us give credit where credit is due, however: Paden's impressive archival research establishes and explains shifts in Civil Rights organizations' priorities during the critical years of the Civil Rights movement and the War on Poverty. She reinforces the value of integrating history, politics, and policy in contemporary scholarship—a perspective that has the capacity to reach a general readership beyond the political science community.

In her conclusions, Paden acknowledges that she assesses the Civil Rights organizations' advocacy “without any discussion of the effectiveness of such representation” (p. 166). For this reviewer, a policy-oriented political scientist who cares about outputs as well as inputs in contemporary American politics, it would have been interesting for her to explore the “so what?” question a little more as it relates to the actual impact that these groups might have had and did have on policy outcomes. Moreover, if Civil Rights groups have paid less attention to traditional welfare reform over time, what type of role have these organizations played in a variety of other policy domains, such as education, health care, and food policy?

Civil Rights Advocacy on Behalf of the Poor is at its best when it captures the internal and external factors shaping these groups' policy priorities during and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement and the War on Poverty. Readers hoping for a more systematic temporal exploration will be disappointed that Paden devotes so much less attention to the important politics of social policy debates and decades of the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.