I wish to thank Justin Gest for his thoughtful review of my book: It has helped to sharpen my thinking on the subject of political representation, and his comments and suggestions for the inclusion of a wide range of different variables and concepts in the models set a broad agenda for other studies that might explore the role that contextual variables play in affecting how citizens interact with government.

Gest’s comments, particularly those relating to the importance of studying hyper-local contexts, and those questioning the use of the congressional district as a level of analysis, help to focus attention on a big question: Why care about local political contexts at all? There are, of course, many answers to this question, but from the perspective of democratic theory, one is particularly important: Context matters to how well citizens are represented by their elected officials. We care about where people live, in other words, because where they live might affect whether they get what they want from their government.

To that end, the focus of Putting Inequality in Context is on representation: why and how context affects how legislators perceive and represent their constituents. So the book chooses to highlight a “contextual unit” where such a representative relationship exists: Congress members represent defined areas and make choices as to how to represent the views of citizens living in that area. Gest is correct that these contexts are in part a product of political choices in addition to simple geography. Gerrymandered districts can create artificial “contexts” where citizens on different geographic sides of districts may share a representative but have little else in common.

Gest is also correct that many of the contextual factors that matter to representation—unionization, political norms, and the like—are often as much a product of institutional political choices as they are of local cultures (though such factors are clearly not solely “manufactured” in state capitals and Washington, given the significant variation in them both across and within states). Nevertheless, it is still important to understand whether the institutional environments in which citizens and representatives live affects the sorts of choices that they make. But, of course, all of the aforementioned factors make the contexts that I wish to study not perfectly “natural,” and a product in part of deliberate institutional choices rather than organic local cultures.

These are limitations. But they are limitations worth dealing with if one wishes to study what ultimately matters: whether citizens are getting what they want from their government. Empirically, focusing on the more hyper-local contexts (such as counties or zip codes) suggested by Gest, or adding in “noninstitutional elements” (such as indicators of population density or local economic change) are of little consequence to the substantive conclusions of the book. The main results hold at more fine-grained levels of analysis, or with these sorts of indicators (though developing theories to explain the independent role of such indicators is outside the scope of the book, and naturally a ripe target for future study).

Conceptually, however, a focus on this particular level of analysis matters a great deal. Indeed, for all of the limitations that a district-level analysis brings, it is difficult to imagine a study of the importance of context to representation where one does not have as a primary unit of analysis an actual representative tasked with making choices for an actual constituency. It would, of course, be ideal for purposes of an analysis like this to have a world where districts were drawn without regard for political considerations and contexts were not shaped by explicitly political choices. But such a world does not exist.

As to the issue of race and representation, race is clearly an important part of the story, and the impact of race to representation also varies significantly across different institutional contexts of the sort measured here (cf., John Griffin and Bryan Newman, Minority Report: Evaluating Political Equality in America, University of Chicago Press, 2008). Any full story of political representation needs to have race as an integral part of it. But amidst the growing centrality of identity to American politics, we should not lose sight of other things—economic decline, concentrated poverty, growing income inequality, declining union strength, and the like—that also weaken the representative links between citizens and policymakers. Many, if not most, of these things, of course, have disparate impacts across racial lines, and may intersect with race in nonlinear ways. I hope that these two books and others set an agenda that can aid us in more fully understanding these intersections—without losing sight of the core economic concerns that have been repeatedly shown to motivate citizens and representatives alike.