By exploring the theme of interest representation, this volume goes to the heart of the study of politics. Important current debates in the academy and the world of practical politics revolve around the issues taken up here. The U.S. election of 2012 saw vigorous debate over why people do not vote their “interests,” on the presumption that low-income people favor progressive tax rates or universal access to medical care. A recent example of such questioning, Robert Frank's well-known book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, picked up on scholarly themes about working-class conservatism stretching back several decades, most notably Robert McKenzie and Alain Silver's Angels in Marble and the “embourgeoisement” thesis discussed by John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, and others in The Affluent Worker. The rise of racism on the European right and the fragmentation of party competition in Europe reflect people struggling to figure out what they want and who can provide it. Increasingly, our understanding of human behavior has moved away from an emphasis on external determination from the environment toward awareness of how internal human processes shape political behavior. Major debates of our day revolve around the role of rationality, emotion, genetics, institutions, propaganda, and economics in the processes whereby interests are developed.

This volume makes an important contribution to understanding these processes. It focuses on those that shape our understanding of what we want out of politics, what we project into politics, and what we get from politics. The editors construct a set of analytical categories – which they label identification, mobilization, and adjudication – that help us understand the forces driving representation and their evolution and transformation over time. The contributors encourage us to think about how we identify our interests and goals, mobilize them into action, and resolve the conflicts that are raised. Each person has multiple possible sources of identity, rooted in work situation, gender, ethnicity, institutional affiliation, ideological commitments, religion, and the like. In the course of political action, some of those concerns have to take precedence: thus adjudication is not only between groups with competing goals and multiple modes of mobilization, but within ourselves as some of these identities come to prevail over others. Using this analytic framework, the reader can navigate through the chapters of this book in ways that carry insight both into the cases and into broader issues about the nature of politics.