In his book, Christopher Ellis asks (p. 7): How does context affect how rich and poor Americans make sense of inequality and how they are represented by policymakers? Ellis undertakes a very thorough review of the state of scholarship on inequality in the United States and numerous statistical analyses that largely reinforce current findings about the extent and effect of inequality on participation and representation. However, he argues, broad conclusions about the effect of unequal incomes and political representation are insensitive to the heterogeneity of local American contexts and the different results that he hypothesizes they engender. This is his most important point, and it could set a new agenda in the study of inequality and the consequences it holds for political and social relations.

Noting the variable inequality across the United States—the Gini coefficient for Minnesota’s 6th district northwest of Minneapolis approximates that of Scandinavia, while Pennsylvania’s 2nd district along the “Main Line” of Philadelphia is comparable to Namibia and Haiti (p. 32)—Ellis finds that poor people’s voting rates increase in regions where there are greater accumulations of wealth. He attributes this to the resources available to political parties for voter mobilization and the diffusion of wealthy people’s participation norms (p. 52). Ellis finds that regions with depressed voter turnout tend to be less unionized and subject to voter ID laws (p. 43). Conservative districts, he argues, feature cultures that are more likely to prime self-interest (p. 75) and foster less empathy for the poor, thanks to fewer opportunities for cross-class interactions (p. 81).

Employing data from all 435 House districts during the 113th Congress, Ellis then designs a model that predicts the extent to which House members represent the poor and wealthy based on their measured ideological agreement and voting record on five selected issues for which detailed opinion data are available. He finds that variable inequality across the United States drives differences in political behavior between rich and poor (Chapter 3), differences in political attitudes (Chapter 4), and differences in political representation (Chapters 5–7). Consistently, he finds that the material and social interests of wealthy constituents are relatively better represented in districts that feature unequal income distributions, and are electorally noncompetitive, less unionized, and represented by increasingly extreme Republicans (e.g., p. 134). He then observes a widening gap in representational equality, owing to the intensification of these contextual trends (p. 154).

With his national perspective and theoretical concern with the context of congressional districts, Ellis connects with a growing interest in turning the social-scientific lens to the local level to investigate the mechanisms behind broader empirical trends and their heterogeneous effects. The United States is a vast, diverse country that features perplexing paradoxes and variation from one region to the next—fertile territory for such an analysis. However, while his headline conclusions will concur with many researchers’ predispositions, the substance of his supporting analysis is not convincing.

A fundamental problem is that these local contexts are not produced by the “contextual units” that the author studies (p. 24). Given the gerrymandering that calculates the carefully tailored, amoeba-shaped districts that he examines, the presence of Republican legislators is hardly contextual; it is designed. This also relates to the role of individuals’ self-selection into certain environments of inequality, which the book does not sufficiently address. Likewise, the political culture, norms, barriers to unionization, and voter ID laws that Ellis bemoans and similarly finds determinant are each the product of manufacturing in state capitals and Washington, DC—not the town hall (e.g., Daniel J. Hopkins, The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized, 2018). Only income inequality is measured at the appropriate level.

Setting aside the unit of analysis and selection bias, Ellis’s concern for context is undermined by the largely institutional elements that he examines. Naturally, quantitative analysis cannot capture variation in heritage, culture, and public understandings of hierarchy and class—which are also likely at play. But what about residential segregation and cross-race interactions? What about local economic development and loss? What about urban and rural landscapes? What about demographic change and immigration?

These questions arise throughout the book, but Chapter 3 provides a convenient and early example. Ellis’s principal conclusion is that poor people participate more when they reside in wealthier regions owing to norms and mobilizing agents (p. 52). However, without accounting for the extent of urbanity, diversity, and liberalism in these regions, the author cannot consider the extent to which turnout is aided by the fewer resources required to vote. Concentrated polling places are cheaper and quicker to access among communities not subject to institutional barriers. At a minimum, Ellis’s model should control for regional histories of partisanship and the competitiveness of elections (e.g., Bernard Fraga and Eitan Hersh, “Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections,” Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 13(3), 2010).

Until this point, I have evaluated Putting Inequality in Context according to its stated goals and in a counterfactual world where race plays no role. However, this world does not exist. Without addressing the role of racial prejudice and resentment, one cannot help but think that Ellis is missing a substantial part of the story about inequality in America. The book is blind to the way that public attitudes, income distribution, political participation, and political representation have been historically and are presently shaped by feelings about and proximity to racial minorities. Questions therefore abound: Is the effect of wealth on poor people’s political participation subject to the demographic profile of the poor (e.g., Eitan D. Hersh and Clayton Nall, “The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income-Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records,” American Journal of Political Science, 60(2), 2016)? Are politicians’ concerns for their constituents’ views subject to the demographic profile of the poor (e.g., Daniel M. Butler and David E. Broockman, “Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators,” American Journal of Political Science, 55(3), 2011)? Are the answers to such questions conditional on the extent of racial segregation and the speed of demographic change (e.g., Benjamin J. Newman, “Acculturating Contexts and Anglo Opposition to Immigration in the U.S.” American Journal of Political Science, 57(2), 2013)? The “changing racial and ethnic composition” of American society emerges in a single paragraph (p. 149) toward the end of the book, where it is ruled out as a “plausible explanation” for representational inequality.

This critique is not to suggest that Ellis is in any way ignorant of the profound way that race has defined politics in American society over its history. In that single paragraph, he acknowledges the legacy of race-driven inequities in income and representation in the United States. Alas, it is such an acknowledgment that makes his omission of variables like segregation, demographic change, and measured racial resentment so curious. Such is the nature of debate around inequality on the contemporary Left today: “We can talk about it as a racial issue, but it’s a general economic issue,” said presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at a Wisconsin debate in February 2016.

There is discomfort in discussing race. There remains some denial about the extent to which prejudice continues to handicap the opportunities and achievements of ethnic minorities. There is a fear that connecting inequality to race will disqualify it from concern among a public that discriminates about the deservingness of different Americans. But such a fear implicitly acknowledges the way that race relations—as they relate to distribution, belonging, and entitlement—continue to pervade our politics. And all this creates a stronger imperative for incorporating race into the examination of context and the important social trends therein.

On balance, Putting Inequality in Context sets an important agenda for the study of political and economic inequality. Great gains await future studies that can harness data at the most local of levels to explain how growing differences in income, status, and power manifest themselves at street level and how responses differ from one community to the next. For now, Ellis provides an interesting analysis about the effects of inequality on participation and representation that deserves praise for elements of its design and data analysis. However, it does not get “local” enough to validly measure context. And as conceptualized, this context ignores the shifting demographic landscape of the United States and the residential and attitudinal trends it provokes—key components of the increasingly tenuous and enduringly relevant social fabric of communities.