When Cities Lobby: How Local Governments Compete for Power in State Politics. By Julia Payson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 208p. $99.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

and the responses provide a critical look into how senators and their staff perceive the distribution of power in the chamber. One chapter also draws on Project Vote Smart data to examine whether senators’ votes correspond to their stated preferences on issues. The finding that moderates often lose on their preferences is consistent with recent work showing that legislators reject compromise proposals that would move policy in their preferred direction because they fear punishment from primary voters (Sarah E. Anderson, Daniel M. Butler, and Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters, 2020). While Chaturvedi focuses on the role of moderates in the policy-making process, the theoretical underpinnings of the book provide ample opportunities to look beyond moderates as well. The distinctions between safe, partisan-lean, and swing states invite other timely questions about the willingness of senators to support or oppose prodemocracy measures. For instance, we might wonder how Republican senators from safe states compare with their counterparts from swing states and partisan-lean states on issues like voting rights and election administration. More generally, in an era where general elections are largely uncompetitive, the framework allows us to draw key distinctions among officeholders in both the House and Senate and probe the strategies and behavior of lawmakers elected from safe districts as well. To conclude, Neilan S. Chaturvedi’s book, Life in the Middle, provides a welcome challenge to the notion that moderates hold the key to policy change. Instead, as he shows, their electoral circumstances often put them in a precarious position, and they modify their behavior accordingly to minimize traceability. Although there are high-profile examples to the contrary that we can conjure up, particularly in the Senate, the quantitative and qualitative data detail a host of ways in which moderate lawmakers avoid the limelight on controversial issues. Equally important, the book has significant implications for the future of polarization in Congress, with conservative Republican and liberal Democratic senators likely to be the most outspoken, active, and visible lawmakers in the years to come.