Dara Z. Strolovitch's book offers a timely, unique, and important analysis, and is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that expands the traditional scope of political science. By drawing on relevant literature outside of the discipline and adopting a new approach to the conduct of research within the field, Strolovitch invigorates the study of social movement actors and their advocacy organizations in the United States. First and foremost, she provides us with an exemplary model for conducting empirical research that emphasizes the interaction of such identity categories as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Second, she collects original quantitative and qualitative data using 1) a telephone survey conducted with officers and professional staff at 286 advocacy organizations, and 2) face-to-face interviews with officers and professional staff at 40 advocacy organizations. Such data allow for the first large-scale and in-depth examination of interest groups and advocacy organizations that claim to speak for women, racial and ethnic minorities, and low-income people. Third, her investigation of the extent to which these organizations attend to the particular challenges associated with advocating on behalf of multiply disadvantaged (or intersectionally marginalized) subgroups within their own historically disadvantaged constituencies has political relevance for coalition builders and practical implications for grassroots activists. For all these reasons, I expect this thought-provoking and powerful book to spark lively debate among social scientists in general and political scientists in particular.

Strolovitch delineates the complex ways in which advocacy organizations serve their advantaged subgroup members at the expense of their disadvantaged constituents. More specifically, she uncovers a consistent pattern of neglect whereby advocacy organizations exacerbate, rather than alleviate, inequities in representation when they pursue their policy agendas, target institutions, and build coalitions based on a strict hierarchy of interests. While some readers might wince at the fact that advocacy groups often prioritize the interests of their most advantaged subgroup members, others will call into question whether this practice undermines their legitimacy as advocacy organizations that claim to speak for the truly disadvantaged, especially when the most disadvantaged subgroup members who are uniquely situated at the intersection of more than one marginalized group are neglected by the very organizations that are best suited to serve their interests. By privileging an issue like affirmative action over welfare and antipoverty policy, Civil Rights organizations prioritize the needs of their middle-class, college-educated subgroup members and essentially ignore the needs of poor and working-class subgroup members who receive public assistance. Despite expressed desires to represent the least of their brethren, officers at these organizations often assume that other advocacy organizations will work on welfare and antipoverty policy and that the benefits of their efforts on issues like affirmative action will trickle down to disadvantaged subgroup members—for example, low-income women. That is to say, issues that affect disadvantaged subgroup members like domestic violence and sterilization abuse receive the least amount of attention, and issues that affect advantaged subgroup members like racial profiling and hate crimes receive the most attention.

In terms of tactical strategies, Strolovitch finds that advocacy organizations are reluctant to pursue litigation in the courts and do so only when efforts to target the legislative and executive branches have been unsuccessful. Such a pattern of institutional targeting as a matter of strategy for advocacy organizations reveals that a disproportionate share of their time, money, and resources is spent on issues that benefit those who are the best-off among their constituents. Coincidently, the author finds that advocacy organizations join coalitions to remedy the inequity of representation for intersectionally disadvantaged subgroups, but do so strategically through relatively shallow and largely symbolic means. She is clear on this point, particularly as she highlights the potential costs and benefits of coalitional work. The potential benefit is that intersectional understandings about issues often prevent advocacy groups from pursuing goals that are harmful to intersectionally marginalized subgroups. However, the unevenness of contributions made by advocacy organizations, as evidenced by the lack of time, money, and resources devoted to coalitional efforts, often accounts for the fragility of their joint ventures on issues that affect these marginalized subgroups. In light of this, she avers that advocacy organizations employ a double standard that determines the amount of time and resources they devote to issues that affect differentially situated subgroups—specifically, advantaged subgroups who benefit from a strict hierarchy of interests on account of their status vis-à-vis disadvantaged subgroups.

For this reason, Strolovitch offers a list of best practices that reflects a set of principles that she calls “affirmative advocacy”—a conception of redistributive representation that aims to overcome the not-so-subtle but often entrenched biases against members of disadvantaged subgroups who are uniquely situated at the center of one or more marginalized groups. She succeeds admirably at making the case for equal and fair representation for intersectionally disadvantaged subgroups, insisting that their issues be given priority and due attention by advocacy organizations and interest groups.

Affirmative Advocacy ought to stimulate further research on intersectionality that, following Strolovitch's lead, combines original data, mixed methods, and cross-disciplinary sophistication. While her normative argument is clearly informed by the work of critical legal theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Mari Matsuda and black feminist theorists such as Patricia Hill Collins, she derives her research questions and testable hypotheses from the empirical literature on intersectionality and representation, and she carefully blends quantitative and qualitative methods. Strolovitch's ingenious collection and use of original data raises the bar and sets the standard for future empirical investigations of social differences and power disparities between and among marginalized groups. This book should be required reading for students and scholars in political science and other related fields, particularly those interested in intersectionality, social movements, and advocacy organizations.