Atchison and Shames raise several interesting questions from the standpoint of empirical social science. They ask for a large-N survey of the political fiction genre, which would perhaps reveal whether the fictions I discuss are representative of some population. They note that many of the televised fictions the book addresses had comparatively small audiences (though astronomical in comparison to the number of people who read political science research) and thus wonder how influential they could be on political attitudes. They write that the book embraces behavioral research. Empirical social science is not the field on which my book attempts to play, but, as I state in the first chapter, it is the default mode of storytelling in our discipline. The very reasonable questions raised by my interlocutors do then gratifyingly, if a bit ironically, support the book’s thesis about the dominance of this mode of thinking.

Indeed, it is precisely the point of the book that the political television shows and political theories addressed in the first seven chapters had selective appeal. The West Wing, House of Cards, Scandal, Borgen, Yes, Minister, The Thick of It, and Veep were shows about, by, and for societal elites. Similarly, the book argues, the discipline of political science is composed of a set of theories by and for a bunch of professors. These shows and theories represent inward-looking discourses that, when they occasionally become visible to the great majority of people, paint an unattractive or at least inaccessible picture. Along comes, at the end of the story limned by the book, Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, with a much larger viewership and a very different story to tell about political authority and material success. So the book operates as a narrative, rather than being composed of a set of atomized case studies, and it searches for the ways that political television constructs politics rather than just illustrates it.

Why not a quantitative survey of all shows about politics? Here I follow Stuart Hall’s lead in his seminal 1973 article, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” which responded to the US Surgeon General’s quantitative study of the portrayal of violence on television. The Surgeon General’s team tallied each instance of violence in TV westerns, then sought to link exposure to bloodshed on TV to violent acts by children in real life. It found little correlation because, as Hall pointed out, the meaning of violence committed by a sheriff or hero against an outlaw was to promote good order and respect for the rules, rather than mindless imitation. Counting and tallying did little to reveal meaning and have not been central to the field of television studies since.

Finally, does Imagining Politics “embrace behavioral research”? Yes, as an interesting and extremely useful set of stories, but not on its own ontological and epistemological terms. I am glad that Atchison and Shames highlight this, because it was my intention to engage with research in the mainstream, rather than dismiss it out of hand as is the norm in critical circles. Will behavioralist scholars thus feel embraced by the book and embrace it in turn? One can hope.