In Talking Politics, Taylor Carlson, Marisa Abrajano, and Lisa García Bedolla follow in the tradition of books like Huckfeldt and Sprague’s Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication (1995). They take up the call for scholars to turn their attention to communities—rather than typical nationwide, public opinion surveys—to gain a better understanding of how social structure matters for a variety of political behaviors and outcomes. However, in doing so they issue their own call to action, noting (rightly) that the literature on social influence has focused almost exclusively on White populations and that “scholars have insufficiently discussed or explored variation in political discussion networks across groups by ethnorace, nativity, and/or gender” (p. 25). Because most nationally representative surveys contain few minority respondents (or because of choices made concerning specific cases/research sites), scholars actually have little sense of whether what we know about networks applies to Americans who identify as Asian, Black, or Latino or who vary in their foreign-born status.

Fortunately, Carlson and coauthors address this oversight by conducting the 2016 Political Discussion Network Survey, an original study designed to provide detailed information on members of minority populations (as they are embedded in communities) in different parts of California. This decision to ground their study in America’s most populous state makes sense, given its majority-minority composition and large foreign-born population. The authors’ design choices on this and other fronts are well articulated and defended: they trade off some external validity to carefully examine the nature and consequences of social networks for members of the aforementioned ethnoracial groups.

Talking Politics reveals this careful examination over the course of seven chapters. After making the case for studying social dynamics among non-White populations, in chapter 2 the authors discuss the parameters of the survey that sits at the heart of the book. The study was designed to collect in-depth information on respondents’ interpersonal discussion networks (something not done in typical public opinion surveys). Administering surveys online in the wake of the 2016 election, the authors encouraged individuals to name up to five discussants (via a “name generator”) and to provide additional information on the characteristics of those people/relationships.

To obtain a large number of interviews with minority respondents (more than 3,800 observations; ~50% from Asian-Americans and ~20% each from Blacks and Latinos), the authors undertook a creative data collection strategy: they partnered with community organizations doing voter outreach with these ethnoracial groups. Specifically, the authors used the voter contact information provided by these organizations to sample individuals for the survey. It turns out this was a clever move for several reasons, because it yielded not only relevant frames but also ones tied to specific communities, thereby preserving some information on broader social structure and shared experience (relative to, say, just purchasing nationwide lists of individuals with certain ethnoracial characteristics). Likewise, the coordination with community organizations also set up the second source of data that appears in the book: qualitative interviews with canvassers from the partner organizations. These interviews were conducted to “paint a more nuanced picture of political discussion within communities of color” (p. 38). Excerpts of these interviews appear throughout the book—across chapters they motivate analyses and provide additional perspective on results. The qualitative interviews are especially effective in communicating the idea that ethnoracial networks operate in community contexts that present their own (opportunities and) constraints for individuals with respect to civic engagement. Indeed, networks and contexts play an especially important part in socializing people into politics and governance.

In chapter 3 the authors describe the nature of respondents’ named political discussants, looking at network size, frequency of discussion, and partisan composition by ethnoracial group and nativity status. Two essential points emerge: there is variance in characteristics across groups, and no one set of explanatory factors serves as a consistent predictor of network characteristics across groups. The statistics in this chapter alone make for a noteworthy contribution; the benchmarking will be useful to scholars conducting their own community studies or oversamples with ethnoracial groups.

In the next three chapters the authors consider how the familiar network characteristics of size, frequency of discussion, and partisan composition predict a series of dependent variables. In chapter 4 they model efficacy and trust, and in chapter 5 they turn their attention to political knowledge and policy attitudes. In chapter 6 the authors move from opinion to action, looking at the link between networks and engagement (conceptualized both in terms of civic involvement and then political participation). Each chapter is well organized, opening with a helpful discussion of relevant literature (presented in the service of setting up hypotheses), before proceeding to a clear presentation of model estimates and closing with a summary and discussion. In the final chapter the authors review their findings and urge scholars to continue studying how social-structural factors shape the political experiences of individuals based on gender, ethnoracial group membership, and nativity.

Across the second half of the book the authors often find support for familiar relationships in the social influence literature, such as the association between frequent discussion and political attitudes, as well as links between network characteristics and rates of political participation. However, a point noted in chapter 3 is often repeated, essentially emerging as a—if not the—theme of the book: “one size does not fit all.” That is, there is variance in relationships across ethnoracial (and other) groups, and we have to look at and theorize carefully about the constellation of social and individual factors that shape attitudes and behaviors for different subpopulations.

Although it makes substantial contributions to our understanding of social structure and ethnoracial political behavior, Talking Politics misses a few opportunities to break new ground when it comes to the more general study of social networks and communities. For example, one wonders what interpersonal interaction looks like for these respondents beyond “core” discussants—indeed, using aggregate relational data batteries (or other techniques in addition to name generators) to get at broader patterns of exposure might have been helpful. Likewise, although the authors collected information on network partisan composition, one has to wonder what is actually flowing through networks in terms of content and how this might matter. What does interpersonal “disagreement” really mean when so many of the study’s (California) respondents identify as Democrats? Finally, although the authors do well highlighting the confluence of the individual, the social, and the contextual, theorizing a bit more about community characteristics (or perhaps adapting the idea of “types,” a la Chinni and Gimpel’s Patchwork Nation, 2020) might have provided additional insights about how broader social structure matters.

Still, Carlson, Abrajano, and Bedolla have produced a thoughtful, well-written, and ultimately important book. The work is accessible enough for undergraduate courses, though its deft blending of work on race, social influence, and political psychology will help it find a home in graduate seminars. Just as Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment (2016) used a state-based design to provide a context-sensitive portrait of an “overlooked” part of the electorate, Carlson and coauthors’ spotlight on California residents reminds us that the American electorate is rapidly changing and diversifying and that we need to take a different (social-structural) tack if we are going to understand how many of its members make sense of politics.