In Race, Gender, and Political Representation, Beth Reingold, Kerry L. Haynie, and Kirsten Widner push scholars of gender and race/ethnicity politics to consider the ways in which standard approaches obscure and erase the experiences of women of color in office. Noting that most work in these two subfields adheres to a “single-axis” approach (i.e., studying “women” and “people of color” as monolithic groups), the authors advocate for a more intersectional approach to the study of representation, which acknowledges that race and gender are inextricably linked. The authors make the compelling case that we cannot really understand the consequences of women’s inclusion in political office without considering race, nor can we understand the consequences of the inclusion of people of color in office without considering gender.
By explicitly considering the legislative behaviors of Black women and Latinas (along with those of white men/women, Black men, and Latinos), Reingold, Haynie, and Widner center these legislators’ experiences to examine the constraints they face, their policy impact, and the factors underpinning their emergence in office. In doing so, the authors offer us a richer understanding of who speaks for which groups, how, and under what conditions. Throughout the book, the authors reveal shortcomings of failing to account for the influence of race-gender and forcefully argue that understanding the intersections of these identities offers us a deeper, and ultimately more accurate, understanding of political representation.
The book’s first chapter lays out Reingold, Haynie, and Widner’s argument that an intersectional approach is necessary for our understanding of political representation. This chapter evaluates the current state of the gender and politics and race/ethnicity politics literature and elucidates why an intersectional approach is necessary for both fields. This chapter will challenge readers to rethink their own assumptions about gender, race, and ethnicity, and it will serve as a call for scholars to develop new arguments and hypotheses to better understand the complexities of a raced-gendered political system. The chapter is exceptionally clear and compelling, and though the later empirical chapters only serve to support the authors’ case, this introductory chapter would also be a highly valuable resource in its own right for students of representation.
Chapter 2, the first empirical chapter of the manuscript, examines the geography of descriptive representation and assesses whether the factors that shape the emergence in office of white women and men of color equally shape the emergence of women of color. This serves as a logical starting point for the empirical analyses, as no legislator can shape policy outcomes without first winning office. While Reingold, Haynie, and Widner find that factors that influence the ability of men of color to win office seem to impact women of color similarly, there are important racialized differences among women. For example, Black women seem to uniquely take advantage of state term limits, while Latinas are able to capitalize on the opportunities provided by multimember districts. This chapter offers initial evidence underscoring the necessity of an intersectional approach. As the authors note, racialized differences among women candidates show that women of color are not less constrained than white women running for office, but they are “differently constrained.” These differences have important implications for who serves in office—and ultimately which voices are heard—and would be impossible to understand if we considered candidate race and gender in purely additive terms.
Chapters 3 and 4 shift emphases and examine how an intersectional lens can help us understand substantive representation. Using a wealth of data on bill content from 15 state legislators, Reingold, Haynie, and Widner examine the influence of legislator race-gender on bill sponsorship. They demonstrate that while women of color are no less likely to sponsor “women-specific” bills (compared with white women) or “Black- and Latinx-specific” bills (compared with Black and Latinx men), when examining group interests more broadly defined (here education and health care), Black women and Latinas are among the most active legislators. In Chapter 4, the authors dig deeper and examine policy leadership on race-gender policy. Again, they document the policy leadership of women of color, finding consistent support that these women are more likely to engage in race-gender policy leadership, a role that narrower conceptualizations of group interests would have obscured.
The final empirical chapters of the book look at policy content more closely, asking whether and how women of color advocate for multiply disadvantaged groups. Using matching to compare the substance of legislation introduced by various race-gender groups of legislators, Reingold, Haynie, and Widner show that women of color are especially distinctive in the substantive focus of their legislation when compared with white women and men (of all races and ethnicities), with women of color introducing more pieces of legislation that “simultaneously address multiple and varied forms of inequality marginalization and oppression” (128). This point is underscored by the final chapter, which examines Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) policy making as a case study and shows that women of color played a distinctive role in shaping policy implementation in the early years of TANF. This chapter—when paired with the book’s earlier analyses—does a masterful job of highlighting the ways that single-axis approaches obscure the role played by women of color and why an intersectional approach is necessary for understanding policy formation, passage, and implementation.
Race, Gender, and Political Representation is a powerful piece of scholarship that would be a valuable addition to any course on political representation, gender and politics, race and ethnicity politics, and legislative politics. The book makes a compelling case for why a more intersectional approach to the study of representation is not only a worthwhile pursuit, but an essential one. In many respects, the book is a “call to action” for future scholars to grapple with the political consequences of intersectionality, to consider its implications for their own work, to answer old questions in new ways, and to ask new questions.
