The Advantage of Disadvantage, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press, distinguishes itself as a highly original, comprehensive, incisive, and timely analysis of how legislators react to protest by the people of the United States. The book takes a 360-degree approach to theorizing, data collection, and analysis; a burden required of any work that makes what appears at first glance to be the counterintuitive claim that legislators pay more attention to protest activity from economically disadvantaged groups, compared to those with more resources.
The logic of the argument begins with the theoretical prior that disadvantaged Americans in comparison with those with more resources have higher barriers to participation and therefore experience the cost of political activity more acutely. Gause goes on to model the consequences of this unequal footing for both the content of the message protest activity sends to legislators and their motivations for receiving and acting upon it. The formal model articulates the theory that there is an advantage to disadvantage because legislators pay more attention to protest activity among the disadvantaged because they only act when they have intense issue preferences. Moreover, the high salience of the issue to low-resource groups propels political activism in the form of protest not at predictable intervals matched to the election cycle, but instead at the time issues are encountered, thus adding uncertainty and dynamism to legislators’ perceptions of their constituents. Taken together, legislators have incentives to treat protest among the disadvantaged as an information-rich signal, providing indicators of both the position on the issue and the intensity of the preferences expressed.
Gause goes on to test the theory with survey data from legislators and legislative staffers, and with empirical analyses of legislative behavior linked to protest activity reported on in media during the 1990s. Further, protests that are digitally based are analyzed in a final empirical chapter. Together the analyses produce thorough tests of the theory and compelling explanations of political dynamics.
This is the kind of book one reads more than once, because new insights are gleaned with each encounter. It is also the kind of book one wants to assign students to read because of the match between the analytical precision of the argument and the empirical results examined to test it. But perhaps a most important outcome this reviewer experienced in reading Professor Gause’s manuscript is that it became clear that it is one of those unusual books that makes one think about the consequences of political engagement in a different way. Protest and its effect on policymakers, and ultimately government policy, is one of the most understudied yet significant areas within the broader field of political participation. Gause’s argument goes contrary to conventional wisdom in the political behavior literature that higher levels of resources—whether in the form of income, education, social and political connection, status in the racial hierarchy, and any other number of socioeconomic indicators of privilege—always mean more attention from those in power.
There are many examples of what has been considered to be a truism in American politics, from the classic studies by Sidney Verba and his collaborators to more recent work by Achen and Bartels, that it is the resource-rich whose views prevail in political representation. Gause’s most significant contribution, therefore, is her success in demonstrating that protest activity is different. The Advantage of Disadvantage fits well within race and ethnic politics, studies of political participation more broadly and protest in particular, as well as informs the fields of interest groups and mobilization of marginalized people. This is a work of scholarly research that will stand the test of time, accomplishing a now-altogether rare feat of challenging the reader to think differently about the long-standing assumption that more resources yield the same result.
