Search

Interest in strategic approaches to an understanding of judicial decision making, including the implications of the separation of powers (SOP), has grown dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, almost all the research on these SOP interactions has been limited to those involving the U.S. Supreme Court. Laura Langer's book provides a refreshing alternative to the exclusive Supreme Court focus by examining the significance of separation of powers concerns for the exercise of judicial review by state supreme courts.

“Do we need yet another comparative study of revolutions?” (p. 5; emphasis in original), Jeff Goodwin asks in this eagerly (and long) anticipated and important new book, which is destined to influence scholars in several disciplines and fields. The answer, as this volume makes abundantly clear, is “yes,” and few will be disappointed with this well-written, accessible, and compelling volume, the most nuanced and sophisticated argument yet for the state-centered (but, pace Goodwin, not structuralist; see p. 53) approach, and worthy heir to Theda Skocpol's (1979) still paradigmatic States and Social Revolutions. But therein lies the rub: Rather than the first book of the (putative) emergent fourth generation of scholars of revolution(s), this is likely the last of the third generation. Goodwin concedes he has “largely moved beyond” (p. xvi) the perspective he articulates here, and he, along with John Foran, is one of the most likely suspects to produce the next paradigmatic statement on revolutions. This, then, would seem the third generation's crowning glory; given the long gestation period and the prolific Goodwin's many and impressive contributions to matters revolutionary, this is almost more a legend than a book.

If you remain befuddled, perplexed, or even a bit hazy about why scholars have shifted in the last decade from talking about “government” to talking about “governance,” this is the volume for you. Debating Governance, edited by Jon Pierre, brings together a diverse group of scholars to analyze the meaning and value of this concept within their respective subfields. The title of the volume may, however, be ambiguous. These scholars are not debating the meaning and value of the term governance among themselves. The contributors to the volume generally agree that governance is a useful and valuable concept. Despite differences in emphasis, perspective, and language, the authors generally agree about why we must shift from talking about “government” to talking about “governance.” The debate, if there is one, is with those who would deny or ignore fundamental changes in the way in which we govern ourselves over the last several decades.

As the distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor notes in his foreword to this book, liberal democratic political systems are becoming more diverse in terms of the cultural identities of their citizens, yet their legitimacy, unlike that of autocratic states or empires, depends on maintaining a certain level of unity and homogeneity. Without it, neither democratic participation, nor a regime of equal rights, nor even satisfactory economic performance appears to be possible. The effort to create a semblance of coherence and common purpose while recognizing and accepting unavoidable diversity, a theme that has dominated Canadian political discourse and practice for a century and a half, has become a preoccupation for much of the world. Yet there are more questions than answers. Consociationalism, a fashionable concept a generation ago, no longer has many supporters among social scientists. Federalism, originally invented in the United States for quite a different purpose, can accommodate conflicting nationalisms only if a precise geographical boundary can be drawn between them—and not always then.

The volume and quality of the scholarship generated of late on the question of the “varieties of capitalism” has been truly outstanding. We now know far more than we ever did about the internal workings of particular national economies, and about the determinants of what Angus Maddison once termed the “proximate” causes of their competitive strengths and weaknesses. That knowledge has come in part from the work of a talented set of comparative political scientists and industrial sociologists, many of whom participate in this collection. It has also come from the work of a set of economists and economic historians with sufficient professional courage and intellectual integrity to operate at (or even beyond) the edge of their notoriously narrow and institutionally blind discipline. But because that knowledge has come from so many sources, and because so much of it has entered the public domain in the form of discrete case studies or collections of relatively disconnected essays, what the subfield now needs, more than anything else, is the consolidation of a set of organizing frameworks and governing concepts designed to go beyond proximate causes to a fuller understanding of the dynamics of competitive advantage. This is why Peter Hall and David Soskice's much-heralded collection of essays, Varieties of Capitalism, is so important a milestone in the development of the subdiscipline of comparative political economy. At long last it gives us what Pepper D. Culpepper calls here an “analytical tool kit” (p. 303): a collection of essays built around the powerful conceptual devices of “comparative institutional advantage” and “institutional complementarities”—concepts deployed to explain “how the institutions structuring the political economy confer comparative advantages on a nation, especially in the sphere of innovation” (p. v).

Recent years have witnessed momentous political transformations across the globe. From Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union to South Africa, these changes are often described as transitions from state bureaucracies, party dictatorships, and authoritarian rule to liberal constitutional democracies and market economies. Andrew Arato, moving gracefully among the fields of political theory, sociology, history, constitutionalism, and comparative politics, redirects our attention to the originary moment of constitutional creation, when ordinary lawmaking recedes in favor of extraordinary politics and higher lawmaking. It is also a moment when fundamental constitutional norms emerge as the main point of contest within political debate and action. Combining empirical and descriptive analysis with normative considerations, Arato persuasively demonstrates how the mode of creation of new constitutions affects the democratic and institutional content of these transformations as well as the prospects for future consolidation of the newly developed constitutional norms.

The principles of state-based representation in the Senate and “one person, one vote” reside comfortably, yet incongruously in the American political psyche. Few of us have lectured on the Senate without raising this point. We carry on about Wyoming and California and their equal number of Senators. Perhaps our lectures extend to discussion of policy issues: Would Clarence Thomas have been confirmed if the Senate were apportioned based on population? and so on. But seldom does the discussion go much further. And, strikingly, this has been true even in the academy. We have 1,001 ways to measure committee preferences, but we know relatively little about the effects of state-based representation in the Senate. Lee and Oppenheimer's book changes this state of affairs and offers an excellent account of the importance of state-based representation for the Senate and beyond.

Nothing energizes a field of study more than a revolution. The explosion of new forms of mass communication is just such a revolution for the field of political communication, to judge by this volume. As its 22 chapters demonstrate, profound changes in the technology and institutions of mass media have prompted a wide-ranging and stimulating effort to document, interpret, and theorize.

Jacqueline Stevens grapples with the meanings of political society and affiliation and how we think about what constitutes family, nation, ethnicity, and race. How do we come to know ourselves and others through these political artifices and naturalized identities? Her project is to trouble our complacencies and make visible the arbitrary practices that produce the inclusions and exclusions of the “state-nation” (p. 43). She examines democratic, communitarian, and liberal theories of political society and finds little attention there to the problem of membership and the ways groups are constituted. Birth, the family, ethnicity, and national origin are undertheorized or considered to derive from natural, ancestral ties. Stevens addresses these inadequacies, and superbly reveals the centrality of birth and kinship practices to political societies.

As Ted Becker and Christa Slaton affirm in their introduction to The Future of Teledemocracy, this is not “just another book” of scholarly reflection but, rather, an account of “a way of life” (p. xii) in which they have played a central role. Consequently, instead of a detached, critical investigation of the dynamic encounter among technology, communication, and democratic politics, or even a dispassionate appraisal of the implications of a particular aspect of this encounter, what we receive in this book is an intimate digest of Becker and Slaton's 23-year “odyssey” on behalf of their own vision of teledemocracy—complete with “true blue allies” and powerful enemies “who opposed our ideology and had the means to halt our experiments” (p. xi)—framed by a futurist manifesto that unfortunately diminishes the contribution made by the chronicle of the authors' crusade.

Politics of Institutional Choice is an important contribution to the literature on legislative institutions. The authors' backgrounds complement each other to good effect. The result is a study that is both conversant with the literature on legislative politics in the United States and Western Europe and solidly grounded in the politics of contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of reformed legislative institutions by the Russian Republic in 1993 left the newly elected representatives with the need to devise a working set of parliamentary institutions for the newly formed bicameral legislature. The “building materials” out of which these were fashioned—legislative committees, party caucuses, rules allocating agenda control to leaders—resemble those of the U.S. Congress and Western European parliaments, but the institutional structure was adapted to the needs of Russian politics.

Scholarship is substantial and growing on "transitional jus- tice," that is, the legal and political decisions devised by incoming democratizing regimes to address the excesses of outgoing repressive regimes and the harms endured by their victims. Truth commissions are perhaps the most significant, if controversial, innovations in a democratizing regime's toolbox. Their significance is largely derived from their peculiarity. Since the early 1970s, approximately 21 commis- sions have been established in various countries. They have been defined as "bodies set up to investigate a past history of violations of human rights in a particular country-which can include violations by the military or other government forces or by armed opposition forces" (Priscilla Hayner, "Fifteen Truth Commissions-1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study," Human Rights Quarterly 16 [November 1994]: 597-655).

It is evident to any serious observer that the practice of governance in Western democracies is increasingly divergent from traditional theoretical and conceptual models. In West- ern Europe, traditional models of parliamentary democracy no longer accurately describe reality. The neocorporatist literature of the 1970s and 1980s pointed out the key role of organized interests and their (often formally recognized) privileged relationship with the state, creating arrangements that bypassed or subverted usual parliamentary processes.

What is the role of political theory in a world of partisan politics? Various approaches to this long-standing problem are raised in this stimulating collection of essays. Arlene Saxonhouse begins the volume by usefully reminding us of Plato's metaphor of the ship in book 6 of the Republic, in which self-interested sailors fight over the boat's direction "while the one who knows how to guide the boat, who can read the stars, stands aft staring upward and is considered useless" (p. 19). Similarly in the Assembly, self-interested rhetoricians may sway the crowd, without any concern for the pursuit of truth.

Few concepts in international relations have aroused as much debate and emotion among political leaders, activists, and scholars as that of sovereignty. Diplomats continually invoke it, transnational organizations attempt to circumvent it, and scholars debate its meaning and wonder whether globaliza- tion is making it obsolete. Yet, most accept the premise that sovereignty is not only the foundation of our international system but also one of the few consequential institutions we have in world politics.

This complex, ambitious, and large book seeks to question, reformulate, and enhance the scope (and methods) of inter- national relations theories, particularly those formulated within a realist framework. The authors question that frame- work, the Westphalian model of putatively unitary nation- states, quantitative methods of empirical investigation, and the levels-of-analysis paradigm. The breadth of their critique is extensive and, consequently, highly ambitious. Rather than approach international relations as a system of unitary nation-states inspired by realist principles, which is arguably a partial and simplified portrayal of contemporary research, the authors favor a complex system of "overlapping, layered, and linked polities" that have both horizontal and vertical dimensions. The latter dimension is particularly important, as it concerns patterns of authority, identity (including ethnic- ity), and institutions that compete for the loyalty of individ- uals.

A decade after communism's collapse, what do we have to report? For one thing, some states certainly have it easier than others. A handful of the postcommunist states located in close proximity to the West have made admirable progress in constructing viable market economies and meaningful insti- tutions of democratic representation, but a much larger group has yet to taste the fruits of what Western politicians in the 1990s called "market democracy." Among this latter group, some retain at the time of this writing a formal commitment to democracy, but others have never moved very far from the authoritarian cronyism where they started.

Literary forms of inquiry into politics range far beyond the journal article and the scholarly monograph. Myron Aronoff's monograph serves us well by respecting the novel of international intrigue as an insightful form for analyzing the politics of diplomacy, bureaucracy, covert action, and international regimes. Aronoff targets the latter-day dean of spy novelists, David Cornwell, who writes under the name of John le Carre´.

Recent calls for public sector reform advocate reinvention, deregulation, reengineering, outsourcing, and privatization to address deficiencies in the classic bureaucratic model and to improve government performance. Reform efforts that seek to capitalize on the advantages offered by the three sectors-public, private, and voluntary-include experiments in public-private policy partnerships. Experience with coop- erative undertakings between the state and for-profit or third-sector service providers spans the last three decades. This book examines the pros and cons of these public-private policy partnerships, isolates the determinants of success or failure across policy spheres, and identifies the circumstances under which cross-sector partnering should be promoted or avoided.

In 1988 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), on behalf of B. H., a 17-year- old youth in foster care, and nearly 20,000 other children forced to live outside their home because of abuse and neglect. Attorneys accused the DCFS, responsible for pro- tecting and placing such children, with violations of Illinois statutes and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. B. H., for example, had been placed in ten different settings despite clear evidence that children require continuity of care for their emotional growth.