As a discipline, political science’s dominant paradigm for understanding elections and representation is rooted in analogies between elections and economic transactions. Rather than trading goods and services, citizens give their votes to politicians who offer their preferred policy positions (e.g., Downs 1957; Adams, Merrill, and Grofman 2005).

Using the economics paradigm, most research on inequality and representation has primarily looked to differences in levels of participation as the source of this bias (Verba 2003; APSA Task Force 2004). The argument is that politicians favor some groups because those voters are more likely to vote or are more likely to support the candidate if the candidate helps them (Bartels 1998). The implication is that if groups participated at equal levels, they would enjoy equal levels of representation.

Though common, the view that equal participation would secure equal treatment is wrong. In Chapter 4, for example, I showed that when a janitor and an attorney write the same letter, using the same arguments, politicians systematically discount the janitor’s views. Similarly, in Chapter 6 I showed that when minorities and whites write letters to legislators asking for help, legislators systematically give better service to the constituents from their same racial group. The advantage of these experiments is that the e-mails sent to legislators are simple and held constant; the constituents are making the same requests. The favored groups in these cases do not have better connections or better arguments; they are favored simply because they are part of the right group.