Moved to Action: Motivation, Participation, and Inequality in American Politics. By Hahrie C. Han. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 208p. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Extract

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.