The commonly prescribed remedy for underrepresentation of racial minorities in the United States has been the formation of majority-minority districts. However, race-based districting is not without problems and has come under increasing scrutiny by the courts. Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and David Brockington argue that alternative electoral systems, specifically cumulative voting (CV) and limited voting (LV), can result in more minority representation, increased competition, greater campaign activity, and higher voter turnout than majoritarian systems. In Electoral Reform and Minority Representation, the trio has written a groundbreaking volume that serves as a model for empirical political scientists. By using the tools of social science to gather evidence from the real world of politics, the authors address questions fundamental to democratic society. The writing, analysis, and discussion are easily accessible, and the findings should generate considerable debate among academics, public officials, and citizens alike.

The authors chronicle the history of alternative voting systems in the United States, and discuss the emergence of CV and LV voting in response to Voting Rights Act actions brought by minority plaintiffs in the 1980s and 1990s. They identify nearly a hundred towns, cities, counties, and school districts with alternative electoral systems, found mostly in small, rural, southern communities in Texas and Alabama. Much of the book's empirical evidence relies on comparisons between CV and non-CV jurisdictions, matched on the basis of geographic proximity, racial composition, median income, and population characteristics. This strategy generated a treatment group of communities under alternate electoral systems and a control group of communities with majoritarian electoral systems.

Many of the empirical findings come from elite survey data collected by the authors. Chapter 4 focuses on the attitudes of political candidates, particularly the ways in which white and minority candidates respond to CV elections. The authors present evidence that minority candidates are much more likely to ask voters to “plump” (cast all votes for one candidate), and that minority candidates are more likely to say that groups in the community were working actively to register and mobilize voters on their behalf. Chapter 5 provides evidence that CV elections are more competitive than majoritarian elections, and that groups in CV elections are more likely to register voters than are those in non-CV jurisdictions. The chapter also includes a multivariate analysis of campaign activities demonstrating that controlling for other factors, candidates in CV places have higher levels of personal campaign activities, including speaking publicly, conducting interviews with editors and reporters, and meeting with supporters.

After considering elite attitudes, the authors shift attention to citizen reactions to alternative electoral systems. Unfortunately, the authors do not have survey data from citizens in the rural southern communities that make up such a large part of the analysis. As a result, they present evidence from a 1989 exit poll conducted by Richard Engstrom and Charles Barrilleaux during the first CV school-board election in Sisseton, South Dakota. The authors demonstrate that Native American candidates respond to vote-coordinating strategies and that Native American candidates were more likely to be contacted by a campaign and asked to plump.

The authors also analyze administrative data, including measures of voter turnout, election results, and demographics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Education. In several multivariate analyses, they demonstrate that CV elections increase turnout by 4% to 5%. The authors also provide evidence that CV and LV rules result in levels of minority representation greater than plurality at-large elections and similar to single-member simple-plurality elections.

One of the book's shortcomings resulted from efforts to explore the relationship between minority citizens and minority officeholders. The authors' use of pooled American National Election Study data on minority representation in Congress seemed misplaced in a study of local elections. In addition, given the importance of case selection in this study, the authors needed to provide more details on the comparability of cases. A table providing detailed demographic comparisons between the CV and non-CV jurisdictions would have been a useful addition. Perhaps the biggest limitation was the relatively short time period covered in this analysis. The authors conclude that CV elections increase turnout, but they do not give enough consideration to the monumental impact of changing a community's electoral rules. They con-cede that “voters could be attracted temporarily by the novelty of a system where they can vote three or five times for a single candidate but over time could grow bored of this new voting scheme and resume their preferred pattern of apathy” (p. 89). Although the authors briefly address this “novelty factor,” most jurisdictions adopted alternative systems in the 1990s, resulting in too little time to evaluate the longer-term impacts (p. 89). Finally, public education efforts that occurred in CV communities surely affected candidate attitudes, citizen responsiveness, and voter turnout.

Nevertheless, the importance of the topic and the skills of these researchers make Electoral Reform and Minority Representation an important contribution to the political science discipline. The book should be of interest to comparative and American politics scholars, and teaching faculty will likely use examples from this book in a range of courses. The book would also be appropriate supplemental reading for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.