Because social movements exist to challenge entrenched power structures or change prevailing social practices, they claim to represent marginalized or excluded constituencies. Yet as eloquently argued by E. E. Schattschneider, “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent” (The Semisovereign People, 1960, 35). Lacking formal mechanisms of democratic accountability, social movements, like other organized interests, can fall prey to the trap of overrepresenting the privileged. In addition, some scholars have challenged the idea that movements have any durable influence. Even if we believe that movements represent the excluded, what value do they have if their influence is fleeting? These questions problematize the democratic value of social movements and raise questions about the value of protest in shaping policy that affects marginalized interests. Are movements effective pathways to greater democratic inclusiveness, or do they reinforce existing power structures?

Hahrie Han's review asks how the argument I develop in my book—that social movements can provide a form of democratic representation for marginalized groups—might be applied to movements other than women's movements and issues other than women's issues. In the book, I develop some distinctions between types of groups and types of issues as a way of answering these questions, arguing that social movements are especially important for social change issues (called “progressive” policy issues in more recent work) and for giving voice to systematically disadvantaged (or marginalized) groups. I explain each of these ideas in turn.

This excellent book explores how and why people participate in politics, focusing mostly on those without the educational, financial, and civic resources that enable democratic participation in the United States. How is it, Hahrie Han asks, that a large, underresourced population returned to New Orleans against great odds to vote in a mayoral election? Han problematizes the received wisdom about political participation, bringing new attention to the seemingly intractable problem of political inequality in the United States. How did these people manage to come from out of town, many of them busing in and out on the same day, to vote in a municipal election? If we find the answer to this question, we may discover new ways to expand political participation in the United States, particularly among those populations that seem to be the most difficult to pull into the democratic decision-making process.

I thank Laurel Weldon for her generous and incisive review of my book. Our two books share a common interest in investigating the mechanisms through which marginalized constituencies gain voice in politics. While my book takes a micro, individual perspective, focusing on questions about participation in American politics, Weldon's takes a macro perspective, analyzing the impact of social movements and movement organizations in a comparative context. Thus, while I try to understand the factors that motivate individuals from traditionally marginalized communities to get involved, she asks what happens when they do get involved: Does their participation in movements and movement organizations matter? These divergent perspectives contextualize some of the very helpful questions Weldon raised about my book.

For some reason, the vast literatures on liberal republicanism and on American policymaking institutions have never quite had their expected courtship, much less received a proper introduction. This is odd, not least because each literature has always (consciously or less so) borne the problems of the other literature in mind. Much of the literature on republicanism has been undertaken with the idea of explaining the ideational roots of modern Anglo-American institutions (Eric Nelson on republicanism more generally, Karen Orren on contracts and labor arrangements, Jeremy Waldron on legislatures), or with eliciting the programmatic and ethical conclusions to which the philosophy underlying our institutions should lead us (Philip Pettit, Michael Sandel, Waldron again). And as scholars of American legislatures, agencies, and courts continue to document exhaustively the factual behavior of those institutions, many have begun to turn to the matches and mismatches between theoretical promise and institutional realities (Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, Richard Hall, Diana Mutz, and most recently Lawrence Lessig). Yet with some very recent exceptions—among them John McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy (2011) and Ira Katznelson's forthcoming volume, Fear Itself, on Congress and American liberalism—the conversation lacks synthetic treatments that take up the themes of both literatures in the same volume. Until now.