Abstract :
Lisa Hill’s response to my critique of compulsory voting, like similar responses elsewhere,1 remind
me how much a child of the 1970s I am, and how far my beliefs and intuitions about politics have
been shaped by the electoral conflicts, social movements and violence of that period.
But my perceptions of politics have also been profoundly shaped by my teachers, and fellow
graduate students, at MIT. Theda Skocpol famously urged political scientists to ‘bring the state
back in’ to their analyses,2 and to recognize that political identities, interests and coalitions cannot
be read off straightforwardly from people’s socio-economic positions. In their different ways, this
was the lesson that Suzanne Berger, Charles Sabel and Joshua Cohen tried to teach us, emphasizing
that political participation and conflict, themselves, can change people’s identities, their sense of
what is desirable and possible, and their ability to make common cause with others.3
