PPS_2000417 269..271 outgroups. Rather, it is about the preservation and integ- rity of the ingroup. For instance, taken together, the results Jardina brings to bear on immigration suggest that whites who are more connected to their race than others see immigrants (presumptively from south of the border) and policies that ease immigration as threats to the Ameri- can way of life. Contrasted with analyses of welfare and affirmative action, where the results suggest that white racial solidarity offers little in the way of explanatory power one way or the other, these findings largely support her claim that it is not racism per se that explains preferences in these domains. Jardina’s findings on Trump and Obama, among others, are also of a piece with her theory. Those scoring high on measures of white solidarity preferred Trump in 2016, while rejecting Obama in 2012. Why? Because Trump promised to safeguard whites from the encroach- ing threat; Obama, in contrast, was a source of threat. Auxiliary analysis, on data collected more than 50 years ago, demonstrates the continuity of her argument. Using a white feeling thermometer as a proxy for white solidarity, Jardina shows that it (solidarity) militated against support for the civil rights movement. White Identity Politics is an example of careful social science. It confronts an important, timely question while using complementary sources of evidence as a means of sorting through competing claims. In concert, the obser- vational evidence, along with the experiments and open- ended questions, go a long way toward elaborating a mostly convincing narrative. However, there are a few loose ends about which I am curious. To begin, one wonders how white solidarity represents a departure from status threat. There are many places in the book in which Jardina claims that white solidarity is activated by threats to white dominance and their (whites’) desire to “reassert” or “restore” it (dominance). This suggests something beyond threat: it implies loss of some kind. This sounds very much like status threat, an approach to intergroup relations pioneered by Joseph Gusfield and Richard Hofstadter in the early 1960s. Further, recent work in political science (Diana Mutz) and many works in social psychology draw on this theory to explain the recent angst of many in white America. Yet, this work is never fully engaged. This is important because Jardina acknowledges in an endnote that “status threat …is an argument very much in keeping with my own,” yet I am not sure where her argument ends and where status threat begins (p. 317). They seem to do the same work. If this is true, I am not sure what white solidarity can tell us beyond what status threat already explains. Another observation related to theory concerns the omission of the social dominance orientation (SDO) from the models of immigration, affirmative action, and welfare dealing explicitly with race. Jardina rightly notes, in chapter 2, a robust correlation with SDO, and this was with data collected in 2013—before the beginning of Trump’s run for president. As far as I know, measures for SDO were included in the 2016 ANES, a data source on which she draws. One wonders, therefore, how much white solidarity is capable of explaining in the presence of SDO, especially after 2015 when Trump announced his candidacy. On the measurement side, for most of the analysis, she uses a single item to measure white identity. Of the six datasets on which the evidence rests, there is only one survey for which multiple items are available. By contrast, there are four surveys on which multiple items for white consciousness are available. Further, to the extent that white identity represents a component of white consciousness, one wonders why Jardina did not stick with white consciousness instead of jumping back and forth between the two. Given this and the lack of more robust measures for white identity, one also wonders why she did not simply use white consciousness as the proxy for white solidarity. Having said that, White Identity Politics is a must read for students of American politics, particularly those who study race and racial politics. It is a well-written, mostly careful account of how we arrived at the current political moment. Jardina has mapped a potentially fruitful path for herself and other scholars who wish to explore a more benign alternative to white nationalism and racism. More scholars should follow her path, asking big questions that address emergent contemporary issues in American society. The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics. By Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, and Michelle Whyman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 328p. $97.50 cloth, $32.50 paper. doi:10.1017/S1537592720004296 — Matt Grossmann , Michigan State University grossm63@msu.edu The US federal government since the mid-twentieth cen- tury is the political science discipline’s most frequent case study. And yet its fascinating trajectory is often treated as mere background for current events, rather than as a unique story merging broad political patterns and specific historical developments. Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, and Michelle Whyman’s new book, The Great Broadening, tells its familiar and important narrative with substantial new insight because it synthesizes the large-scale dynamics of the political system’s substantive focus. The federal government massively broadened in policy- making scope in the 1960s and 1970s, presaging a con- servative backlash, partisan and ideological polarization, and a move from congressional lawmaking to oversight. From 1961–76, Congress passed many more important laws than usual—and nearly all political indicators show a March 2021 | Vol. 19/No. 1 269 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 00:52:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5573-5993 mailto:grossm63@msu.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 https://www.cambridge.org/core bulge of activity around that time. The action was largely bipartisan and occurred across the policy spectrum. This activist era is reflected in the permanent new institutions that it built and the expansive new vision of national government that it endowed us. The Great Broadening shows that this extensive law- making led to a largely permanent expansion of the national policy agenda: it both brought new social prob- lems and issues to government’s attention and deepened the scope and scale of its engagement with existing issues. The agenda expansion was visible in the topics of legisla- tive hearings, bills, and budgets. A conservative backlash was able to stop the growth of the agenda but not to reverse it. The national government thus still pursues myriad goals in differentiated policy pockets. The expansion had two key consequences for Congress. First, it passed fewer but larger bills, addressing many different topics at once and leaving most policy-making details to agencies. Second, it stopped holding many hearings on bills or new legislative ideas and shifted to executive branch oversight. Despite Congress’s burgeon- ing role in maintenance, these changes made it less an institution for developing new policy and more a forum for grandstanding. Polarization came after the broadening, largely led by conservatives (with the Republican Party moving steadily rightward starting in 1978). The interest group explosion also came in its wake, with most groups fighting to protect existing benefits or stop new regulation, rather than calling for new policies. Republicans, who had been partners in the expansion, became more opposed to new initiatives and more critical of the inherited policy structure. Policies of the broadening era created the bureaucracies and constituencies to remain sustainable, but not to continue expanding indefinitely. As a result, groups pushing for change are now more likely to have stable opponents and partisan sides. The Great Broadening helps fill in the gaps between research on policy making and political parties. Like the initial broadening discussed in the book, theories of policy making also tended to start out largely nonpartisan. But it is clear in retrospect that much of the policy development they tracked was dependent on Republican acquiescence, which has now become much harder to count on. The long success of liberal policy making eventually under- mined conservative cooperation—and Republicans have become less interested in maintaining the enlarged system. The Great Broadening is structured as an outline of this phenomenon, followed by an evaluation of its potential causes and then a review of its many consequences. The methodological discussion is admirably clear in articulating both the reasons why broad social research over decades is necessary and the inevitable downsides that come from the macro-level approach. Social scientists, the authors remind us, should not pretend that variables such as election outcomes, interest group organizing, or the content of media coverage have relatively constant influence on the political system over time. Instead, we have experienced and cataloged one particular history. In the only version we have, many different influences came together at once and enduringly changed what came afterward. Scholars nonetheless have to work with the evidence available—and the incredible team of Jones, Theriault, and Whyman have assembled copious data to document the key trends and evaluate their potential antecedents and implications. Scholars who work in any particular policy area or subset of US policy-making institutions should not lose sight of the big picture. Analyzing the development of energy or health policy without seeing it as part of a general expansion and stalemate would be incomplete, for example, just as tracking the workings of agencies or lobbying firms without noting their provenance would shortchange the foundational role of policy. Given such a broad political transformation, however, any monocausal explanation is likely to fall short. Although Jones, Theriault, and Whyman are cognizant of the many important factors driving change, they concentrate on the role of social movements, especially protests sur- rounding civil rights, in coaxing the political system to broaden. I remain deeply skeptical of this explanation. Protest activity certainly coincided with the policy- making period, but (as always) it is difficult to tease out causal forces with time-series plots alone. Congress expanded its policy action in many areas that were not the subject of substantial protest and did not draw from demands of broad social movements. Like interest group development, many social movements fol- lowed (rather than led) associated policy innovation. In addition, analogous broadening was occurring in other global political systems less tied to the US civil rights movement. The book does usefully dispel other theories based on single explanatory factors, such as critical elections, parti- san majorities in Congress, and public opinion trends. But as with the role of protests, it is difficult to see the broadening reaching its full potential without these back- ground factors also being present. Political science should also give the internal actors of the time period real agency in bringing about the expansion: many experienced presi- dents, legislators, and group leaders are widely credited by historians for working out passable compromises. Despite the complexity of understanding causes, The Great Broadening has important lessons for contemporary politics. First, although keeping an issue off an agenda has long been seen as the critical second face of power, nearly everything is now on the political agenda in some form. The challenge for activists and policy entrepreneurs is instead fighting for attention against nearly everyone else to raise the salience of one issue among many, even for minor revisions updating prior policies. 270 Perspectives on Politics Book Reviews | American Politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 00:52:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 https://www.cambridge.org/core A second key lesson is that scholars and policy makers must be attentive to the many layers of policy that are now our inheritance. For example, even with a flowering of new policy ideas in the 2020 campaign season, the actual stimulus bills recently debated in Congress tended to include long lists of incremental adjustments to prior policies alongside their headline initiatives. Any new policy idea has to enter the thicket of current laws and institutions. Although The Great Broadening itself is focused on Congress, it should also persuade political scientists to give more attention to the bureaucracy and subnational governments. Jones, Theriault, and Whyman have (per- haps inadvertently) illustrated why much of the action is no longer in Congress. If the agenda is already wide (and if Congress can barely update the many government func- tions it has already initiated), much of the innovation is likely to come in administrative rulemaking and state and local implementation. The Great Broadening is an impressive synthetic achieve- ment. It tackles macro-level questions with grace and attention to detail. It constitutes proof that political science can still add a new perspective, even about the institutions and periods scholars have studied most closely. Gender Differences in Public Opinion: Values and Pol- itical Consequences. By Mary-Kate Lizotte. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020. 256p. $79.50 cloth, $27.95 paper. doi:10.1017/S1537592720004120 — Leslie A. Caughell , Virginia Wesleyan University lcaughell@vwu.edu The background for the 2020 US elections included a global pandemic that had already killed well over 200,000 Americans, a president expressing at best tepid support for democratic institutions, and months-long Black Lives Matter protests against structural racism. Nevertheless, one thing about the election felt familiar to anyone who follows American politics—the ubiquitous coverage of gender gaps. These systemic differences in women and men’s evaluation of candidates, policies, or political party capture our attention because they remain a consistent presence in American politics. As important, they also influence the outcomes of American elections. Gender gaps in policy preference create gender gaps in partisan identification and vote choice. Yet despite their important consequences, the academic literature on gender gaps in policy preferences leaves many questions about their causes unanswered. Mary-Kate Lizotte’s book, Gender Differences in Public Opinion, addresses these questions, exploring the role that values play in the creation of the gender gaps in policy preferences. Lizotte offers us a new explanation for the gender gaps in political preferences: gender differences in prosocial values. Women possess greater concern than men with the well-being of other people. As a result, she argues, women express lower levels of support for the use of force by the government and higher levels of support for regu- lations and government spending to protect the environ- ment, as well as for policies and government spending on social welfare programs. Gender gaps in prosocial values also seem to explain large portions of gender gaps in support for gender roles, affirmative action, racial resent- ment, and gay rights. Her mediation analysis indicates that two particular prosocial value types, universalism and benevolence, explain substantial portions of the gender gaps that exist on attitudes about the use of force, the environment, equal rights, and social welfare issues. Gender Differences in Public Opinion makes a meaning- ful contribution to the literature on gender gaps in policy preferences. Much of this literature involves theories explaining gender gaps that fail to transcend policy domains. For example, explanations of gender differences in aggression relate to gender gaps in foreign policy preferences, but this theory does not readily explain the emergence of gender gaps on economic or social issues. In focusing on gender differences in values that underlie issue preferences, Lizotte offers a theoretical framework for the development of gender gaps that transcends the piecemeal approach to explaining them that characterizes much of the scholarly literature on this topic. At the same time, Lizotte compares the impact of prosocial value types on the development of gender gaps with that of other prominent explanations, including feminist consciousness, economic circumstances, and social role theory. Consistently, her analysis suggests that prosocial values play a greater role in the development of gender gaps than other potential causes. Her inclusion of these competing explanations provides the reader with a sense of the impact of prosocial values relative to other possible causes of the phenomenon, albeit often with less- than-ideal measures of those other possible causes. Her careful analysis of how her theory performs relative to others represents a clear attempt to move the literature forward, not just by offering another competing explan- ation for the development of gender gaps but also by allowing us to evaluate and potentially discard other theories. Yet as a reader, I found myself questioning whether Lizotte missed opportunities to integrate existing theories into her framework and to resolve some of the seemingly disparate findings in the gender gaps literature. For example, Lizotte could have integrated feminist consciousness and social role theory into her values frame- work. Both of these explanations also involve values—in particular, values that are, to a large extent, prosocial. A feminist consciousness, as defined by Pamela Conover in “Feminists and the Gender Gap” (Journal of Politics, 50 [4], 1988), means that an individual possesses an awareness of inequalities, demonstrates a willingness to use government to address those inequalities, and March 2021 | Vol. 19/No. 1 271 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 00:52:58, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004120 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1521-7822 mailto:lcaughell@vwu.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720004296 https://www.cambridge.org/core