I am grateful for Professor Scrinzi’s thoughtful comments about my book. I will begin my response by emphasizing the distinctive intellectual value of Perspectives’ “Critical Dialogue” format. A thematic pairing is surely especially generative when the books take complementary empirical strategies. Professor Scrinzi organized her book around ethnographic data in answering (mostly) sociological questions about RR parties, while I organized mine around statistical data in answering (mostly) institutional questions about ideologically diverse parties. Many of our questions for one another correspond with our books’ mirrored emphases and omissions.
I view any book’s research design in terms of trade-offs. Professor Scrinzi notes in her review that Beyond Left, Right, and Center would have benefited from greater consideration of available cultural repertoires for parties’ issue framing. This comment helpfully amplifies the motivation behind my use in chapter 4 of Carol Bacchi’s (2009) approach, as stipulated in Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Political actors’ framing choices direct their subsequent efforts. My book’s combination of within-Germany and between-country analyses maps the extent to which cultural-contextual differences produce inter-party variation, even while it does not cover finer-grained repertoires.
Within Germany, parties vary significantly in their framing of political inclusion, which shapes their actions—but neither corresponds with left/right categories. For example, German parties’ candidate recruitment strategies are better explained by the parties’ age and institutionalization than their shared cultural repertoire. The Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union, CDU, center-right) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party, SPD, center-left) undertake analogous candidate training and mentorship programming despite their other differences, and the book (chapter 5) argues that this is because they have developed similar corporate practices.
In turn, cross-national analyses show that prevailing social attitudes set the national stage, but not equally for all political actors. Cultural context moderates right-leaning parties’ inclusion of women more than their left-leaning counterparts, which are relatively consistent in their incorporation of women across otherwise different settings. These findings complement the analysis that Professor Scrinzi’s review calls for.
An additional benefit of these within- and between-country analyses is that they view “the right” alongside other parties. As Professor Scrinzi observes, many RR studies address the RR alone, even though it is just one element of any given party system. My book’s greater focus on constellations of political parties is a tradeoff for a lesser focus on the cultural repertoire available for any single party or party family.
Professor Scrinzi comments that holistic attention to party systems also helps expand our understanding of what it means for women, and especially multiply marginalized women, to support RR parties. As my book shows, parties across the ideological map all represent multiply marginalized women poorly. Parties on “the left” are not entitled to the support of marginalized social groups without regard to their actual advocacy for these groups’ interests.
Similarly, I believe that my book can speak to Professor Scrinzi’s query about implications for feminist mobilization. Namely, these findings show that coalitions of actors across ideologically divergent positions are key to gains for historically marginalized groups. If “the left” is inconsistent in its advocacy, and “the right” may include advocates, then we must look for allies everywhere.
Finally, I wish that my book covered Germany’s September 2021 and February 2025 elections, and the 2024 formation of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Professor Scrinzi correctly surmises that data collection and subsequently page proofs pre-date these events, which offer additional illustrations of the limitations of left–right frameworks for understanding political representation. This makes my future work clear, and I hope that other scholars will take it up, as well.
