Are edited volumes an endangered species? Publishers report poor sales of most titles, junior faculty are advised not to publish in them lest tenure committees frown, and a scant few feature pathbreaking research. Yet occasionally, an essay collection reminds us of the considerable benefits of this scholarly genre. The best edited volumes are oriented around a compelling theme, address that core from diverse perspectives, and feature a collection of expert authors working at a high scholarly pitch. The Politics of Democratic Inclusion is one such book.

Editors Christina Wolbrecht and Rodney Hero begin by persuasively casting democratic inclusion—defined as “political incorporation, representation, and influence of various disadvantaged social groups” (p. 4)—as foundational to the American political order. This is hardly a new topic among political scientists or historians. But collectively, the chapters address the subject from a fresh angle, viewing institutions as essential constraints on and abettors of inclusion in the U.S. polity.

The volume is organized into three sections; reading each provides an unusually coherent look at one vital aspect of the interplay of institutions and democratic inclusion. The first section concerns diversity within and across groups: Here, one focus is, as expected, the myriad (and oft-changing) ways in which inter- and intragroup differences affect issues like immigrant incorporation and social acceptance of minorities. But each chapter in this section also investigates institutions' role in group definition and delineation. Thus, for example, Jennifer Hochschild's powerful study examines the ways in which “skin-tone hierarchies” intersect with formal-legal routes to exclusion and inclusion. Michael Jones-Correa similarly integrates institutional concerns into his overview of immigrant incorporation, outlining the complex dynamics arising from the federalist U.S. polity's multiple, fragmented institutional layers. Dennis Chong and Reuel Rogers distinguish black Americans' experience of inclusion from that of other minority groups, while attending to the institutional effects of that separate consciousness: These are evident in patterns of voter turnout, party membership/participation, and other indices of political engagement.

Chong and Rogers's attention to elements like party involvement and campaign activities provides a neat transition to the volume's second section, which features five chapters devoted to mediating institutions—interest groups, parties, social movements—as (often imperfect) agents of inclusion. Separate contributions by Paul Frymer and Jan Leighey each take up the effects of political parties on African American mobilization and incorporation. Together they drive home an important point. The two-party system typically “is thought to promote the inclusion of racial minorities and groups otherwise disadvantaged in terms of wealth, resources, and power,” in Frymer's words (p. 122). Both authors instead demonstrate that the party system tends to discourage blacks' participation; their explanations differ in respects, but the overall argument is convincing—and disturbing. Such a conclusion is further affirmed by Miki Caul Kittilson and Katherine Tate's comparative attention to U.S. and U.K. political parties and inclusion. Their chapter also addresses the importance of political opportunity structures (an underutilized concept in studies of American politics) in shaping the intricate relation of parties and minority representation.

Parties are again at issue, this time concerning immigrant incorporation, in Kristi Andersen and Elizabeth Cohen's ambitious chapter. These authors trace patterns in immigrants' political engagement across time, identifying three principal factors that influence democratic inclusion: institutions, public policy, and differential characteristics of immigrant groups. Their stark reminder that, across U.S. history, large swaths of the immigrant population were not integrated into political and civic life raises an intriguing question about interest groups' role in this process: Will these “non-party institutions” facilitate inclusion “in more or less effective and desirable ways?” (p. 202). Anne Costain provides a partial answer in her chapter on social movements, describing the trajectory from outsiders' movement to established interest group as engendering an “endurance of struggle” that is “among the most effective [means] historically for winning political access for excluded groups” (p. 119).

Social movements mark a rare success story, especially compared to parties, in terms of mediating institutions' incorporation of out-groups. The primary governing institutions of the U.S. state, as explored in the book's third section, fare little better. Presidents, like parties long heralded as icons of democratic inclusiveness, are shown by Patricia Conley to have hindered as often as advanced incorporative changes. Though a small number of presidents, such as Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and FDR, have played vital roles in opening the political system to historically excluded groups, attention to these figures obscures the wide “variation in presidential responsiveness” (p. 328). A similarly demythologizing account of federal courts is supplied by Michael McCann and George Lovell. By a different path they arrive at a conclusion similar to Gerald Rosenberg's in The Hollow Hope (xxxx): that courts are a poor source of enduring change for “excluded, exploited, or subaltern groups in the United States” (p. 276).

David Canon's chapter on racial interests and congressional representation revisits his memorable Legislative Studies piece of a few years' vintage. Readers unfamiliar with descriptive representation, racial redistricting, cumulative voting, and other hot-button topics will find this an expert summary. Whether Congress, the “people's branch,” serves more generally as an avenue to democratic inclusion is left an open question here.

Especially welcome were two chapters on non-national institutions. Susan Clarke's treatment of urbanization and “splintering citizenship” reminded me how unfortunately rare are accounts of city politics in studies of U.S. governance. Hers was also one of the volume's strongest theoretical treatments of democratic inclusion, questioning established models and offering two intriguing alternatives, both based around local governance. Also locally oriented is Kenneth Meier's chapter on school boards, and education bureaucracies more generally: The widening gap between U.S. schools' aspirations to teaching tolerance and acceptance and actual classroom practices continues this book's sobering assessment of the state of democratic inclusion in past and present-day America alike.

At the time of this writing, debates about immigration were front and center in Washington, with serious commentary on all sides expressing genuine perplexity about how to proceed. Balancing a desire to aid 12 million illegal immigrants (most of them essential low-wage workers) seeking some form of amnesty and road to citizenship with fears of international terrorism seems as thorny a problem as has existed in the turbulent history of U.S. immigration policy. Public officials in search of illumination would do well to pick up The Politics of Democratic Inclusion, both for a deeper understanding of the issues involved and a set of searching policy discussions.