America's Uneven Democracy: Race, Turnout and Representation in City Politics (review)

America's Uneven Democracy is an ambitious empirical intervention that stakes a solid flag into the territory defining the significance of voter turnout to local elections. Through the trifecta of electoral turnout, race dynamics and urban politics, Hajnal bets on ways to address the overrepresentation of white voters while simultaneously and more importantly, addressing the underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minorities -especially Asian Americans with Latino/as and blacks to a lesser degree. He not only builds a sophisticated empirical argument, he makes practical and feasible suggestions that-if enacted-could have dramatic effects on voter turnout, minority representation and policy outcomes.

Hajnal offers a careful negotiation between the popular-yet empirically unsubstantiated -belief that presumes turnout is relevant and the outcome of research at the national level that shows otherwise. America's Uneven Democracy represents an important contribution to the literatures of electoral behavior, race and urban politics. The work is unique in some ways because of the primacy it gives to race, a role not usually granted to race in other studies of electoral politics. This study is also distinctive in that it turns an analytical lens onto local elections while also paying attention to the often overlooked role of segregation and geography.

Hajnal builds nicely from one form of analysis to the next, bringing together national and California-based datasets with different strengths and weaknesses. Every test-every part of his analysis-builds upon and augments previous tests. This progressive and additive element to Hajnal's project develops robustness, constructs significance and firmly pushes the boundaries of existing research. His research deftly moves from simulations to what Hajnal calls "truer" tests-analyses of actual electoral outcomes in both national and local contexts. His arguments make a strong and interesting case for the significance of turnout at the municipal level. Hajnal does an excellent job of identifying the weaknesses in his design and in the available data. He addresses these limitations straightforwardly. By assembling each successive test upon carefully constructed empirical analysis, he makes an impressive case for the significance of turnout without shying away from the limitations of his simulations and other tests.

It is possible that the book's greatest weakness lies in the shortcomings of the data. Hajnal is nevertheless undaunted by the limitations of available data and works analytical magic all the same. In particular, he uses the 1986 International City/County Managers' Association survey, but supplements all of his findings with more recent and "cleaner" data obtained in 2001 through the Public Policy Institute of California cities survey. He compensates for outdated data with more recent California-based data that mostly serve to affirm the ICMA nationwide tests, and sometimes offer other interesting aspects to the work. In the end, he provides reasonable estimates, and his findings are suggestive and provocative regardless of the fact that the answers to his important and interesting questions require some qualification.

It is refreshing to find a scholar of electoral politics willing to give equal importance to race as to the aspects of political behavior he examines. Hajnal's approach to race is nicely nuanced. While many studies of voting behavior often simplify race by addressing blackness (especially in reference to whiteness), America's Uneven Democracy addresses four groups that Hajnal successfully argues are significant voting blocs: blacks, Asians, Latinos/Latinas and whites. Rather than assume that race is a one-size-fits-all-social construction, Hajnal lays out the different ways in which turnout and local institutions matter to different degrees and in different ways for these four groups. While I do not agree with Hajnal's claim that the data he presents "provide one of the most systematic assessments of the state of racial politics in America's municipalities," I do believe his contribution is of great consequence-especially if his recommendations for institutional reforms are headed by municipal governments.

The beauty of Hajnal's argument culminates in elegant practicality by...