Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from Chicago. By Dick Simpson. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022. 272p. $110.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

work. She then layers rich political and political science topics atop the already rich political science topic of lobbying to generate theory about the unique aspects of intergovernmental lobbying. She focuses on variables such as the number of state representatives with districts overlapping a city, the partisan alignment of the city and its state representatives, and the professionalism of the legislature. Throughout this section, Payson fuses theory and empirics, and seamlessly mixes relatively simple correlational analyses with more sophisticated causal ones. For example, she shows a strong correlation between the number of representatives a city has to work with and the probability of a city lobbying, and she exploits redistricting induced changes to examine the effect of gaining more representatives. Here and elsewhere, the analysis is presented in a clear and accessible way with a heavy reliance on figures. All the modeling work in the book is in appendices. Another presentation strength that manifests throughout is the use of quotes and insights from interviews with lobbyists and leaders. Rather than have one qualitative chapter in which all the interviews are collected, Payson weaves them in “just in time” to add color, clarity, and concreteness. Payson then turns to whether city lobbying works. She nicely situates her analysis in the broader literature’s efforts to assess whether “money buys votes” (or anything else). In Payson’s case, the question is whether money buys more money. She shows that city lobbying works on average for cities, except it also frequently doesn’t work, and it works much better for the wealthiest cities. Here again, the findings are compelling thanks to clear presentation, careful explanation, and supplemental analyses (e.g., a placebo test showing no effect on federal transfers). Throughout, Payson is attentive to the potential selection issues that could threaten her inferences, and she demonstrates plenty of idiosyncrasy in lobby decisions. Payson’s overall efficacy finding joins recent work on corporate lobbying that also shows an economic return, contra some earlier work which did not find effects on votes. The variance in efficacy provides a sensible explanation for why cities don’t all lobby all the time. The equity finding feeds the core normative trade-off with which Payson concludes the book and with which I began this review. Put together, it adds up to being the book on intergovernmental lobbying and a great contribution to the broader field of interest group politics. More than that, When Cities Lobby makes contributions about representation, federalism, and political geography. The punchline is that cities hire lobbyists to make up for the fact that in some instances their state representatives are not sufficiently delivering. The optimistic read is that a routine political tool can help overcome the overlap of political and geographic polarization. Of course, there are plenty of reasons for pessimism too—for example, the fact that such lobbying is necessary in the realm of transfers, let alone policy. Additionally, Payson’s tremendous dataset stops in 2015, so there is good reason to expect that the underlying dynamics are now even more challenging for cities. As a good book should,When Cities Lobby leaves us with questions to explore. Two of the biggest are “what about policy?” and “why do rich cities get five times the return on their investment?” Payson takes on both questions, but these discussions are understandably less developed than the core analyses in the book. For example, she shows that a rich city’s advantage is not the result of spending more or hiring more effective lobbyists, and she raises some likely explanations but does not have the data to cleanly pin them down. Likewise, she marshals some brief case studies about policy preemption. The book is a great contribution even if it is limited to the relatively easier case of transfers. However, in future work Payson and others could focus on the messy question of policy impact, which is at least as tied to the fundamental representation issues. The affluent cities issues is critical because of the key trade-off that Payson describes. As an optimist I hope affluent cities’ disproportionate lobbying success is at least partly attributable to a learnable way to play the game and not solely an indicator of another intractable structural inequality. Either way, emblematic of the book as a whole, it is a well-documented and important finding with resonance for scholars with a variety of interests.