In Contested Transformation, Carol Hardy-Fanta, Pei-te Lien, Dianne Pinderhughes, and Christine Marie Sierra use original data from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project to provide a thorough and nuanced analysis of political elites at multiple levels of government in the United States. This book places intersectionality front and center, exploring race and gender, and as a result it provides a truly groundbreaking study of U.S. politics. The racial groups studied are African Americans, Latinos, American Indians, and Asian Americans, making it a rare study that includes these four groups at once. Moreover, subnational politics is the focal point of the book, as opposed to national politics.
The content of the book can be described in two ways. First, the authors seek to uncover the similarities and differences that exist between elected officials of color. Second, they aim to show whether traditional theories of political science, ones based primarily on white people or on men of color, continue to hold when an intersectionality framework is applied. Overall, their findings can best be described as showing more similarities than differences between elected officials of color (p. 374). As for the second question, their findings for elected officials of color are often different from what traditional theories of political science would predict.
In Chapter 1, the authors provide an excellent overview of the historical narrative of exclusion and discrimination faced by elected officials of color, pointing to two key 1965 laws—the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration Act—that led to an increase in the number of elected officials of color. Although that number has been growing over time, it is actually the number of women of color that is increasing, making this the first study to my knowledge to illustrate this point.
Chapter 2 examines local politics, and its findings warrant mention. It turns out that 90% of elected officials of color serve at the local level, many in small towns and cities (see Table 2.5, p. 103). This finding is novel, and more importantly it justifies the need to study politics in America’s small towns and cities.
Chapter 3 provides insight into the backgrounds and paths to office for elected officials of color. When it comes to whether women of color are disadvantaged more than their male counterparts the answer is both yes and no. On the one hand, women of color are advantaged when it comes to occupational prestige, but on the other hand they have fewer financial resources. Overall, the authors illustrate that women of color are not necessarily doubly disadvantaged, which is consistent with the findings of Christina Bejarano’s The Latina Advantage (2013).
Chapter 4 seeks to answer the question of why people run for office. Unlike the traditional path (Jennifer Lawless, Becoming a Candidate, 2012), women of color do not need to be asked to run by political parties; instead community members, family, and friends ask them to run. Moreover, the authors show that the career ladder trajectory does not apply to elected officials of color. For the elected officials of color who serve in state government or higher levels of office, few initially served at the local level (Table 4.7, p. 200).
Chapter 5 examines the experience of elected officials of color on the campaign trail. In this chapter the findings relating to African Americans stand out. The authors show that blacks are mostly elected from single-member districts, corroborating what David Lublin finds in his book (The Paradox of Representation, 1997). Contrary to conventional wisdom, men of color perceive themselves as disadvantaged more than women of color when seeking office, with black men feeling the most disadvantaged. This chapter highlights the important differences that exist among elected officials of color, showing blacks to be different from other minorities.
Chapter 6 explores leadership and governance. The authors show that elected officials of color, regardless of gender, perceive women as better at building consensus and as harder workers. Moreover, although women of color are underrepresented in leadership, they also often vote with the majority. Thus, when looking at political incorporation they are both advantaged and disadvantaged, demonstrating that the world is more complicated than we often characterize it in scholarship.
Chapter 7 considers how elected officials of color think about representation. In response to extant studies about whether elected officials of color are out of line with the preferences of their constituents (Carol Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests, 1993) they show that nearly three-quarters of respondents feel they represent districts comprised of people mostly like them racially (descriptively) and from a partisan standpoint. That elected officials of color see themselves as reflecting their constituents may explain why so many identify as trustees: they embody their districts so it is justifiable to lean on their own understanding when making decisions.
Chapter 8 examines coalition building. In the spirit of Paula McClain and Jessica Johnson-Carew’s Can We All Get Along? (2018), the authors recognize that in the United States racial and ethnic minorities have to work together to maximize their ability to advance their political interests. The authors uncover a powerful finding when looking at a host of issues: women of color share similar support for policies more than do men of color. This finding suggests that women of color are the key to building and maintaining political coalitions across racial and ethnic lines.
As with all books, this one is imperfect in certain respects. Figure 1.4 (p. 44) suggests that majority-minority districts are needed to elect racial and ethnic minorities, but the authors missed an opportunity to show a stronger causal relationship. The authors also could have softened their tone when discussing the dearth of studies of small towns and cities, because the reason why few scholars study these places is the difficulty of data collection, the very thing that makes this book such a gem.
Two criticisms of Part III warrant mention. The authors spend about five pages discussing critiques of measuring leadership (pp. 249–54), but then proceed to measure leadership in the manner criticized. Based on the criticisms levied, one might have expected them to create a different measure of leadership. Both chapters emphasize the perceptions of political elites, and it is unclear whether these perceptions line up with reality. Even examining a subset of elected officials of color to see whether their perceptions were justified would have improved the book.
Overall, this book is a must read for anyone interested in race, gender, representation, and the future of U.S. politics, and its strengths far outweigh any of the concerns mentioned. The term “contested transformation” is an appropriate one, because it recognizes that even though the country is being changed because of shifts in racial demographics, it is also the case that for many this shift is not without struggle. Some actors fight to maintain the political status quo, one that is based on racial and gender hierarchies, even as others struggle mightily to overturn it.
