I am grateful to have found in Robert Talisse a reader who can state the central claims of my book with such precision. He has crafted my elevator pitch: Making Constituencies proposes a mobilization conception of political representation and a constructivist view of political constituencies to release defenders of mass democracy from the competence debates.

Professor Talisse and I both believe in mass democracy—a rare position among political scientists. Because of what we share, I find our differing accounts of sorting most provocative. I believe it is difficult to remain confident about mass democracy in the face of the social identity theory of sorting to which Professor Talisse subscribes, a theory that explains aggressively held political commitments as a psychological propensity. I politicize sorting. Following Morris Fiorina and others, I explain it as a feedback loop. Voters, taking their cues from party elites who are more sharply divided ideologically than they are, become more fiercely partisan in response to elite messaging. Elites, in turn, respond to this divisiveness (which they have helped create) by treating the public to ever sharper portraits of divisions. If sorting is a representation of the electorate, it can be battled by competing representations. If it is rooted in human psychology, isn’t it immovable?

I appreciate Professor Talisse’s critique of my “exclusivist” argument for the constructivist approach to representation because it gives me an opportunity to return to a question I struggled with in writing the book: How can I speak about the dynamism of democratic representation without swinging the pendulum from a constituent-driven process to an elite-driven one? Professor Talisse asks why I did not counter the exclusivist position of interest-first representation, which “holds that responsiveness is the only democratically appropriate model of representation,” with an “inclusivist” strategy. Rather than propose that “representation can never involve responsiveness to a constituency that has developed interests independently of the act of its construction,” I might instead have presented the constructivist approach as merely “identifying another kind of democratic representation.” I find it difficult to imagine that representation could involve “responsiveness to a constituency that has developed interests independently of the act of its construction,” because I do not believe that either constituencies or interests can exist “independently” of acts of representation.

Mass politics involves competition among representatives of many kinds—elected officials, advocacy groups, influential media figures, and even celebrities—to frame the terms of a conflict and thereby influence the considerations that people bring to bear on it. Certainly, elected representatives respond to interests and constituencies that are constituted by acts of representation that they themselves had no hand in making; making constituencies does not mean scripting them. Constituencies and their interests are not elite pawns. They are made, shaped, formed in ways that I tried to specify throughout the book through various empirical illustrations of the “constituency effects” of public policy and issue framings. If my terminology fluctuates, that fluctuation marks the difficulty of speaking about a dynamic process that so many normative accounts expect to be linear.

It is a pleasure to respond to such a thoughtful and generous reader.