The Supreme Court and American Political Development. Edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 400p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In this book, Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch bring together an impressive group of scholars to present essays on how the theoretical tenets of the American political development (or APD) research agenda can help illuminate the behavior and institutional trajectory of the U.S. Supreme Court over time. At the same time, these authors discuss at length the role that the Supreme Court plays in the continuing development of the APD enterprise and the ways in which the American state has evolved. This volume provides a useful contribution, as the APD literature has typically focused on the presidency and bureaucracy (specifically, executive agencies), and more recently on Congress, as the key players in the development of the American state, with “parties and courts” representing the historical antecedents. By focusing specifically on the Supreme Court, Kahn and Kersch place it in a starring role in American legal development, and American political development more generally.

The First Amendment in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Comparative Legal Analysis of the Freedom of Speech. By Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 336p. $50.00.

The growing influence of modern foreign laws and legal rulings on the American model of constitutionalism is a dirty little secret no longer. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, made no apologies about his willingness to consult with rulings from the European Court of Human Rights in holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of due process of law forbids the state of Texas from prohibiting sodomy between consenting adults. Court observers should have seen this development coming: With the breakdown of the Soviet Union came the emergence of new Western-style democracies thrust into the position of building new republics from scratch. American constitutional scholars were called upon in the late 1980s and early 1990s to consult with officials from these countries and advise them on the drafting of their own constitutions. Constitutionalism is now a commodity that travels across international lines. The Supreme Court's controversial method in Lawrence may or may not signal the beginning of a new era of cross-national consultations by the high Court. However, it does coincide with a growing interest on the part of political scientists studying comparative law and comparative constitutionalism during the past decade.

Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress. By Gary Mucciaroni and Paul J. Quirk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 296p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Gary Mucciaroni and Paul Quirk have done the field a service by reminding us that Congress is a deliberative body, even if it is not always a good deliberative body. The authors foreshadow their findings, stating: “Congressional debate is only moderately realistic and informed. Listeners encounter a considerable volume of distortions, omissions, and even falsehoods, with apparent potential to mislead” (p. x). They base this conclusion on a study of effects claims made during three significant policy debates: Welfare Reform in 1995 and 1996, the Estate Tax Repeal in 1999 and 2000, and the Telecommunication Deregulation Act of 1996. Effects claims are claims made during debate about the likely effects of the legislation or amendment under consideration: Reforming welfare will reduce illegitimate births; current tax rates depress incentives to invest; deregulation will help the telecommunications industry grow. The heavy lifting in the book comes from the authors' assessments of the validity of these effects claims (and rebuttals) based on contemporary knowledge of the issues that would have been available to members of Congress.

The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order. By Gretchen Ritter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 400p. $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Gretchen Ritter takes the American Constitution seriously. Like few others, she views the country's fundamental charter as announcing far more than a design for government institutions and a series of individual rights guarantees. The importance of the Constitution, she insists, extends deeper than can be captured by examining the text's most obvious features. It “creates and regulates a social order” (p. 8), a comprehensive understanding of public and private life. “The constitutional order acts as an instrument of social design,” claims Ritter; it endorses certain relationships over others, while also choosing to recognize certain members of the polity as privileged (p. 9). Traditional conceptions of the marital relationship or of the role of particular classes of people in the public realm, for example, are fostered and perpetuated by the constitutional scheme, not because the words of the text necessarily command it but because the nature of a constitution—an instrument that embraces a particular political and social order—makes it so.

Where Women Run: Gender and Party in the American States. By Kira Sanbonmatsu. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 264p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In recent years, scholarship in the subfield of women and politics has met with a puzzling trend. The percentage of women in state legislatures, once steadily growing, has leveled off and even decreased in recent years. It is from this puzzle that Kira Sanbonmatsu's book begins: Why is the growth of women's representation in the state legislatures slowing down, and what do political parties have to do with it? Sanbonmatsu's argument is thoughtful, detailed and compelling, and she generates a bounty of information for scholars of women and politics, state politics, and political parties.

Black Feminist Voices in Politics. By Evelyn M. Simien. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 196p. $71.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

Evelyn M. Simien makes three major contributions in this book. First, and most important, she uses insights derived from a black feminist theory that is largely literary to inform hard, number-crunching empirical research. Black feminist theorists from Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth to Kimberlé Crenshaw and bell hooks are used to derive operational definitions and testable hypotheses. Those seeking unity in the discipline would do well to study this book.

The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War. By Karen Umemoto. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 232p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The Truce, by Karen Umemoto, chronicles a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood that occurred between 1993 and 1994. Umemoto states that her “central concern” is “the relatively quick process through which rather harmonious social relations across racial boundaries are overcome by racial tensions and distancing, which set in place a more fractured pattern of race relations” (p. 5). The book, then, is primarily an analysis of the complex and changing dynamics of racial conflict, and the author uses the gang war to explore that conflict.

The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy. By Deborah E. Ward. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 208p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

A growing literature (including works by Kenneth Neubeck, Noel Cazenave, Gwendolyn Mink, Jill Quadagno, Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Martin Gilens) examines the racialization of welfare policies, welfare administration, and welfare politics. Deborah Ward's book contributes nicely to that literature. The contributors to this literature prove to be an interdisciplinary group and include scholars from history, policy studies, political science, and sociology. Ward's book offers insight to readers from all those fields, although policy-oriented readers may find they seek more analysis, or at least a broader discussion of the implications of the research.

Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms and Power. By Andrew Barnes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 288p. $35.00 cloth.

Andrew Barnes has produced an admirably complex book. While providing a lucid, readable, and persuasive analysis of the evolution of property relations in Russia during the 20 years from 1985, he avoids imposing artificially tidy theoretical schemes on the very messy processes he describes. Instead, he explores the full range of actors, institutions, strategies, and exogenous events that have shaped the struggle for property in Russia since the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. This is above all a work of history—a theoretically informed history, but history nonetheless—and it is therefore a work in which contingency is sometimes important, and one in which the question of which actors shaped which outcome, and why, is always an empirical one—never something determined by an ex ante assumption. In place of a spare, highly theoretical explanation of this or that aspect of Russian privatization, Barnes offers a complex but nevertheless comprehensible account of how contests for control of real assets have evolved hitherto and where they may be headed in the future.

The State and the Global Ecological Crisis. Edited by John Barry and Robyn Eckersley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 307p. $67.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

The 12 essays offered in this book are a bit like an invitation to a New York cocktail party; the experience is impossible to fully anticipate from a first glance. And like a good cocktail party, this book is interesting not only for the content of the conversations but equally for what it reveals about the participants' relations, values, and assumptions, and even for what the guests might learn about themselves.

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. By Paul R. Brass. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 448p. $50.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

Rioting in South Asia is commonly understood as a form of political activity, and the idea that it may not be spontaneous but planned is not a novel one. However, in The Production of Hindu Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Paul Brass makes the more interesting claim that riot-prone cities are those that are marked by institutionalized systems that create, control, and direct the course of riots. He bases these ideas—developed in his earlier work Theft of an Idol—on four decades of research carried out in the northern Indian town of Aligarh, home to a sizable and historic Muslim community. Brass argues that polarizing issues or incidents by themselves do not lead to riots, but that a toxic mix of interested politicians, an existing discourse of communalism, an ineffective administration, and a specialized network that “produces” riots enhances the likelihood that such incidents will eventuate in riots. In describing this social construction of rioting, Brass highlights interesting features, such as the need for a group to dominate the narrative describing the riot, which establishes it as a defensive rather than offensive measure, thereby creating legitimacy for the violence.

Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations. By Alexander Cooley. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 191p. $35.00 cloth.

War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. By Victoria Tin-bor Hui. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

These two ambitious books by Alexander Cooley and Victoria Tin-bor Hui address the consequences of managerial decisions within empires. Cooley's book borrows organizational models from the field of business management to explain the growing pains of empires and the misfortunes of newly independent states, with a particular focus on post-Soviet Central Asia. Hui draws on classical authors to explain how basic structural administrative choices within states affect systemic competition.

Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 331p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

In recent years, there has been a surge in work on what has come to be known as “qualitative methods.” The trend is essentially reactive, developing as a response to the outpouring of work on quantitative and formal methods and the assertions by scholars in those areas that case studies and historical work are impressionistic, unscientific, and noncumulative. To counter such claims, some of the field's most distinguished qualitative scholars (e.g., Stephan Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 1997; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003; and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 2006) have spent much time and ink to show that researchers who eschew regressions or game theory can be just as methodologically aware and sophisticated as those who embrace them. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences is an impressive and welcome addition to this literature.

Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? By James L. Gibson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. 448p. $47.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In this engaging and meticulously constructed statistical analysis of attitudes among South Africa's apartheid-defined racial groups (African/black, Coloured, Asian, white), James Gibson sets out to do two things. One is to map the state of political reconciliation among these groups. The second is to measure the impact of South Africa's truth and reconciliation process, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in promoting reconciliation. The analysis is based largely on a national opinion survey carried out in 2000 and 2001, but also draws comparatively, where possible and appropriate, on a similar survey from 1997.

Rotten States? Corruption, Post-Communism, and Neoliberalism. By Leslie Holmes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 440p. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

As a veteran of corruption studies in the postcommunist world, Leslie Holmes addresses three fundamental issues confronting students of corruption: the definition and categorization of corruption, the impact corruption has on democracies, and causal factors that account for its rise within postcommunist states. The comparative study focuses on Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. China, the author argues, has developed a system akin to postcommunism and is treated in the analysis as far as data permit. The author also refers to other postcommunist cases, when appropriate, and many of the observations and inferences would apply to all democratic countries.

Why Race Matters in South Africa. By Michael MacDonald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 245p. $45.00.

Given that more than a decade has passed since the initiation of the “new dispensation,” a book about the present and future of South Africa that reassesses connections with the past seems appropriate. In this book, Michael MacDonald investigates the evolution of racism and racialism and their linkages to state legitimacy and governance. This empirical examination of South African politics and political economy is well ensconced in the literature. The author provides a rigorous case analysis within the literature of race and class.

Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment. By Isabela Mares. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 288p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

Just three years after publishing The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development, a prize-winning book on the role of employers in the development of European welfare states, Isabela Mares offers an overarching explanation of labor market performance in postwar Europe. She builds on the institutionalist literature in political economy, but combines its best-known models of labor markets with other elements. As foundations, she takes the Calmfors-Driffil model, which stressed that unemployment varies with labor union centralization (since more centralized unions are better at delivering wage moderation), and the Soskice-Iversen model, which stressed that unemployment varies with the independence and policies of central banks (since union moderation is encouraged by nonaccommodating monetary policy, which adjusts to cancel out wage inflation that exceeds productivity growth). Mares notes, however, that in most cases, neither union centralization nor monetary policy institutions have varied as much as unemployment over time—leaving these models better able to account for cross-national variation than for cross-temporal patterns.

Citizenship in Britain: Values, Participation and Democracy. By Charles Pattie, Patrick Seyd, and Paul Whiteley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 364 pages. $70.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

What does it mean to be a British citizen in the early part of the twenty-first century? The authors of Citizenship in Britain address this question through the lens of the Citizen Audit, comprehensive surveys carried out as part of the Economic and Social Research Council's democracy and participation program. The Citizen Audit had three components: “wave 1” face-to-face interviews of 3,145 respondents (62.2% response rate) conducted between September and December 2000, “mail-back survey” questionnaires with 9,023 respondents (37.5% response rate) between January and May 2001, and follow-up “wave 2” face-to-face interviews with a subset of the original interviewees (809 respondents; 67% response rate) between September and December 2001. The wave 1 interviews consisted of 62 questions, while the mail-back surveys and wave 2 interviews included a subset. The authors weighted the raw data by age, sex, and employment status to make them consistent with census data to compensate for nonresponse.

Political (In)Justice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. By Anthony W. Pereira. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 280p. $27.95.

Pereira's new book is a fascinating comparison of the legal systems of the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. It focuses on the concept of “authoritarian legality,” which at first seems to be an oxymoron. As the book unfolds, however, and the differences among the regimes' legal strategies become clear, the usefulness of the concept becomes apparent. This book highlights the importance of the legal dimension of authoritarian regimes, thereby providing important new insights into the nature of both authoritarianism and judicial systems. A broadly comparative chapter also extends the argument to Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, and the United States after 9/11.

Social Movements and State Power: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador. By James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005. 288p. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Anyone interested in the recent renewal of social movement activity and the rise of ostensibly left or center-left governments in Latin America might be tempted to pick up this book, with its provocative jacket photo and appealing title. Unfortunately, the book cover is nearly the only thing going for this sectarian jeremiad from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. If one is looking for serious scholarship, or even solid journalism, neither can be found here. Instead, one finds a poorly organized collage, including descriptions of recent history, critiques of government policies, and tendentious and contradictory evaluations of left strategy. Despite the promise of the title, the authors do not engage the literature on social movements, nor do they contribute much in the way of new analytical perspectives. The class analysis announced in the introduction only emerges occasionally in the subsequent chapters, and even then it is applied mechanically and reductively, yielding an extremely limited capacity to help us understand the character and trajectory of social movements or the nuances of political behavior in diverse contexts. Important cross-national differences in terms of political institutions, ethnic composition, and international constraints are not addressed, much less systematically compared. Furthermore, the book lacks consistent citations of sources, and serious empirical and orthographic errors are sprinkled throughout. Those knowledgeable about the countries in question might be amused by the almost congenital inability to spell correctly the names of politicians, political parties, and labor confederations; those without such knowledge, especially undergraduate students, will only be confused or misinformed.