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Since the 1980s, global financial integration and the rise of neoliberalism have significantly changed the terrain on which European social democratic parties operate. However, fierce debate persists over the evaluation of these changes. Some observers—from widely differing political standpoints—insist that social democracy and the free movement of capital across national boundaries are fundamentally incompatible. It follows that the only options for social democratic parties are either to embrace neoliberalism and dismantle much of the welfare state or organize concerted action to reshape the global financial architecture. An opposing group of analysts are equally adamant that while the terrain has certainly become more difficult, it is still possible for Social Democrats to preserve much of the welfare state and even launch new policy initiatives.

Venezuelan politics attracted little attention from political scientists for thirty years after the defeat of the fidelista guerrillas in the 1960s, but there has been a surge of interest in recent years. The country retained civilian, elected govern- ment through a dark period of authoritarianism in Latin America, which seemed to make it a good candidate for deriving lessons about transitions to democracy. In the 1990s, however, the democratic system entered into crisis. Venezu- ela experienced urban riots, two unsuccessful coups, removal of a president from office before completion of his term, rising electoral abstention, collapse of the traditional parties at the heart of the system, and the election of a coup leader to the presidency. Attention shifted from what went right to what went wrong. These books help us understand the limitations of the Venezuelan democratic model.

What does liberalism imply about our duties to minority cultures, and what do the claims of such cultures imply about the nature of liberalism? These may seem like different ways of asking roughly the same question and, in a sense, so they are. Both formulations invite us to consider the relationship between liberalism and diversity, and both do so in the specific context of group, as distinct from individual, identity. However, and as these two books demonstrate, it makes a difference which question we take as our starting point. Emily Gill begins with a question about the fundamental commitments of liberalisn, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for cultural membership. By contrast, Monique Deveaux begins by asking what justice requires for cultural minorities, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for our understanding of liberal democratic theory and practice.

It was New York Governor Al Smith's famous dictum that the ills of democracy could be solved with more democracy. Many agree with him some 75 years later. The shelves of political science overflow with books lamenting the decline of intermediary institutions that once plugged the hearts and minds of citizens into government and civic life. Democracy scaled down to the town and neighborhood allows people to address problems that are experienced in the routine of everyday life. Stripped of abstraction, politics loses its mystery and the sense of alienation that accompanies it. But Americans no longer gather at the political club, the town meeting, the church, and the union hall. Citizens are plugged into television, the family, or perhaps the job, interested in private concerns. In response, pundits, professors, and politicians call for a revival of local political and civic life. President George W. Bush's “Faith-Based Initiative,” which would use federal funds to support church social service programs, can be viewed as a response to the national mood of a people adrift. While many have forwarded tiresome critiques of what ails us, Kenneth Thomson does the nitty-gritty empirical work that should mark social science's unique contribution to this debate.

The once-formidable Japanese economy has fallen upon hard times. After posting a roughly double-digit rate of real annual growth from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, and generally outperforming the economies of other advanced industrial democracies during the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese economy suffered a prolonged period of stagnation throughout most of the 1990s. Given this dramatic reversal, Bai Gao sets about the ambitious task not only of explaining why the Japanese economy has soured, but of providing a broad institutional framework that underscores the common factors behind the high growth period, the bubble economy of the 1980s, and the collapse of the bubble in the 1990s. To achieve this task, Gao applies what he terms “the logic of reverse reasoning”; he takes the rise and collapse of the bubble economy as the “starting point fortheoretical reasoning,” examining the institutional mechanisms that purportedly produced it. He then works backward in time to reexamine how these institutional mechanisms operated during the high-growth era, and to identify the “environmental changes” that account for the reasons these institutional mechanisms produced such varied outcomes over time (pp. 6–7).

One of the most vexing questions posed over time by political scientists is: Why do democratic polities develop in some countries, but not in others? In his seminal work Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1986), still read today by most students of comparative politics, Barrington Moore strove to answer that question by examining the historical process in which commercial agriculture emerged in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China. In his book, Fernando López-Alves takes the framework that Moore provided and applies it to three countries in Latin America whose trajectories in the nineteenth century led to different polities and experiences with democracy—Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay (he also makes brief reference to Paraguay and Venezuela as so-called control cases). While conceding the need for “further testing” (p. 220), he arrives at conclusions that differ significantly from Moore's, even though he does not attempt to dismiss that earlier work.

The approach to the design and revision of electoral districts in Canada is quite different from that found in the United States, despite the two countries' sharing of the same basic first-past-the-post electoral system. As John Courtney notes in his careful study of the topic, in Canada the emphasis in defining electoral districts, or constituencies or ridings, has been underpinned by concepts such as “community of interest” and “effective representation,” which encompass a wide range of political and social considerations—many local in nature—and which permit substantial deviation from the principle of one person, one vote. At the federal level, the allowable deviation in the size of constituencies can be plus or minus 25% within any given province, with the possibility of even greater variances under special circumstances. At the level of provincial electoral systems, the variances can be even larger, in part due to the fact that in certain provinces the ratio of urban to rural seats is specified in law. At the same time, the actual process of designing and reconfiguring the boundaries of constituencies, in the hands of independent, arm's-length commissions for the past 40 years, has been remarkably free of direct partisan influence. In fact, given the rather tattered state of current Canadian parliamentary democracy, characterized by one-party dominance in the federal parliament and a precipitous decline in voter turnout over the past three elections, the institution of arms-length boundary commissions stands out as something that works well and enjoys broad respect.

Alexander Hicks has written one of the most important works in the past thirty years on the development of income security policies in democratic capitalist states. (Hicks equates income security policies with “welfare states”—a point I will revisit later.) If this were not sufficient, the book also is the most significant comparative public policy study I have read. Based on years of reflection, scholarship and teaching, it covers, not merely cites, a wide range of literatures. It is extremely sensitive to particular historical experiences. It is theoretically informed. Most impressively, it is methodologically sophisticated and imaginative. And the book is concise and well–written. In short, it is a model of what exciting comparative research can be.

These books have similar aims and are written from a similar perspective. There are, however, important differences in content, emphasis, and form. Norma Thompson explicitly seeks to show that the Western intellectual tradition is not misogynist. One reason that it is not, she urges, is that it is not univocal. Within the tradition one can find several very different views of the character and relation of men and women. Introducing the volume he edited, Eduardo Velasquez states, “This collection of essays does not purport to give an answer to the question of what are ‘nature’ and ‘woman,’ at least not in an immediate, definitive sense. Rather, the comprehensive aim here is to reopen questions as to the ‘nature of nature,’ the ‘nature of woman’ with consideration given to the consequences of pairing some understanding of ‘nature’ with that of ‘woman’” (p. xi). A collection of essays necessarily contains a variety of voices.

The new monographs by R. Allen Hays and Allen F. Zundel are welcome additions to our effort to understand the processes by which Americans make social welfare policy. Hays's work looks at the set of interest groups that testified before Congress on poverty policy during the 28-year period from 1970 to 1997, a period characterized by both incremental change and major upheaval in poverty policymaking. Zundel's work examines the rhetorical frames that have driven major social welfare reform efforts over the past century and a half.

National-level policy outcomes produced by European Union–level directives and regulations are much more diverse across member states than one might expect. This is especially true for those undramatic but complex policy areas that lack the salience of high-level negotiations and treaty signings. Adrienne Héritier and her five coauthors investigate the phenomenon of differential national responses to European policymaking in two transportation policy subareas across five states. They focus on the deregulation of road haulage (trucking) and the reform of publicly owned railways in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. This allows them to show just how widely national policy outcomes can vary and still be generally in line with European Union (EU) requirements.

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.

Standing the assumptions and causal propositions of established theories on their head, with an eye to refining them or pointing us to other theories, is a fruitful path to quickening the intellectual pulse, to reinvigorating a field of study, and to contributing to knowledge. The Other Mirror makes an eloquent and persuasive case for midrange theorizing as a tool for revitalizing area studies in general and Latin American studies in particular. If area studies are to recover from their marginality in the general disciplines, area specialists must once again engage the theory-building enterprise central to the disciplines that house them. By concentrating on midrange analysis, area studies have real contributions to make to general theory.

In Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, Thomas Homer-Dixon continues his examination of environmental scarcity. This exploration of the links between environmental scarcity and violent conflict captures much of the related complexity. He finds that scarcities of renewable resources, such as cropland, freshwater, and forests, can contribute to civil violence. As scarcities worsen, the incidence of this kind of violence is likely to increase. Although he acknowledges that environmental scarcity “by itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient cause” (p. 7) of violence, he argues that analysts should not underestimate its importance: Some conflicts cannot be clearly understood without an examination of the role of environmental scarcity. In this work, he offers “analysts and policymakers a tool kit of concepts and generalizations that they can use to analyze, explain, and sometimes predict connections between environmental scarcity and violence around the world” (p. 73).

As the recent political meltdowns in Venezuela and Argentina made clear, a vast gap persists between elite behavior and mass attitudes in much of Latin America. Scholarly understanding of this gap—and its political implications—would benefit from more fine-grained, yet theoretically informed, studies of nonelites. Nancy Powers's Grassroots Expectations of Democracy and Economy is one such study. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 residents of two lower-income neighborhoods in Argentina's federal capital, Powers examines how poor people understand their own interests. She argues that people experience poverty in vastly different ways, and this variation has important implications for political behavior. Thus, to understand how poor people view the relationship between their own material conditions and government policy, one must examine “the conditions themselves and how people live with them” (p. 33). This kind of inductive analysis has important and well-known limitations, particularly for studies—such as this one—based on a small sample size. Yet given how little we continue to know about the relationship between mass attitudes and macrolevel politics in Latin America, such a “bottom up” approach should be welcomed. To the extent that fine-grained inductive research generates insights that 1) are unlikely to emerge out of larger-n studies and 2) challenge or refine dominant theoretical assumptions, it can be extremely fruitful. This is the case with important sections of the book.

The politics of neoliberal reform in Latin America has produced a number of impressions that are more or less widely held, but not necessarily entirely accurate. For example, many critics of the neoliberal reform process see it as a creature of Washington and Wall Street—views of economic development imposed on vulnerable, debt-ridden Latin American governments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank play crucial roles as carriers of the “Washington Consensus” and enforcers of its policy prescriptions. In this view, insulated technocrats—often with U.S. economics degrees—implement these essentially unpopular programs without consultation, oversight, or any societal participation. “Delegative democracy” and populations battered by a decade or more of debt and inflation help explain the extent to which these unelected and unaccountable technocrats have been able to promote this agenda. A narrow electoral coalition, anchored by wealth holders and conservative ideologues, has maintained the political space for these insulated technocrats to continue, despite deep opposition from societal groups such as labor.

Given the Right's historic record of undermining democracy in Latin America, Kevin Middlebrook organized a conference in 1996 to examine its adjustment to the democratic rules of the posttransitions, post-Cold War era. This work began in that conference and is part of the editor's larger research program.

Forty years ago Arnold Wolfers lamented that scholars had failed to examine those rare occasions, following great wars, when statesmen gather to refashion the norms and institutions of international politics. He noted in his (1962) Discord and Collaboration (pp. 137–38) that creating a new order after the close of war is “one of the trickiest tasks of diplomacy,” for how that order is fashioned will have a profound impact on the subsequent pattern of war. Charles Doran's (1971) The Politics of Assimilation, Robert Randle's (1973) The Origins of Peace, and my (1991) Peace and War: Armed Conflict and International Order provided empirical support for Wolfers' insights, but G. John Ikenberry offers the first study that links peacemaking to specific types of international order.

Amitav Acharya has produced an innovative and stimulating evaluation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a crucial juncture in that organization's development. Acharya does not shrink from the challenge of measuring ASEAN's rhetoric of regional cooperation against its actual accomplishments, and the theoretical and empirical sophistication that Acharya displays makes this book sure to be a key work on the security and political aspects of ASEAN for academics and policymakers.

In this book, Festus Eribo gives a broad historical view of Russian–African relations and the role of newspapers in communicating Russian and Soviet perceptions of Africa and its people. Not surprisingly, Eribo argues that ideology drove the content of coverage as the Soviet Union attempted to shape opinion according to Marxist–Leninist principles. In taking on the very broad topic of communication, Eribo notes the presence of multiple audiences but describes the content of Russian domestic newspapers in much greater detail than the story of how Russia communicated with African people. While the topic is important, because this book is descriptive and not theoretical, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers about the role of the media in communicating images of Africa.

Organized Crime and Democratic Governability offers an insightful look at one of the most critical and vexing questions of the contemporary era: To what extent is democratic governance possible when it coexists with organized crime? John Bailey' and Roy Godson's edited volume analyzes the many dimensions of the deeply entrenched obstacles to democratic stability in modern Mexico, perhaps an ideal case study for such an inquiry. The reach of organized crime there has long tended to undermine the very lifeblood of democracy, namely, its procedures. As a result, throughout the sweep of Mexico's postrevolutionary history, the roots of democracy have not been firmly planted. This chronic condition cannot quickly be remedied. Consequently, the editors conclude, organized crime in its various manifestations will continue to present “a significant challenge to democratic governability in Mexico” (p. 218).

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.

This is surely the most ambitious and the most accomplished study of affluent post-World War II democratic welfare states. It uses statistical, case study, and comparative historical methods to describe and explain the course of social welfare policy over the second half of the twentieth century in 16 nations. Quantitatively, the study examines social insurance and service programs, major public expenditure and revenue aggregates, and an array of fine-grained indicators of state redistributive and safety net outcomes, from 1960 through 1994. Somewhat more qualitatively, the study extends its reach to encompass job and gender, labor market, and educational policies over the whole 1945–1996 period. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods of explanatory analysis, the work assesses various accounts of welfare state development and crisis, in particular, its authors' institutionally amplified, class-analytical political resource theory.

Lisa Keister's work offers students of research methods, and of public policy, an ideal model. It also offers, albeit indirectly, a study that should inform policy makers as they discuss proposals to alter inheritance and estate tax policies and privatize Social Security. Wealth in America explores the distribution of household resources from 1962 through 1995. Questions regarding the distribution of wealth in the United States are seldom addressed directly because readily available data do not permit a straightforward approach. Because it is easier to deal with questions related to the distribution of income than with the distribution of wealth, research generally focuses on income distribution and we assume that there is a relatively straightforward relationship between the two. Keister tackles the data problems associated with measuring household assets allowing her to evaluate the distribution of wealth. Since measuring assets at any point in time is a challenge, it is all the more remarkable that she is able to examine changes in the distribution of household assets over time.

There is a certain comfort, a certain ease, with which many contemporary political thinkers reach for an ideal they call “democratic citizenship” in response to a wide range of problems produced by relations of power: problems of social and political inequality, for instance, problems of injustice, problems of exclusion and marginalization. In The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Barbara Cruikshank undertakes the important task of disturbing that ease. “Citizen,” she argues persuasively, is not the atonym of “subject.” Instead, a citizen is a particular kind of a subject, a subject forged in ways that not only enable but also, unavoidably, constrain human social and political possibility. Those who would criticize relations of power need to examine, Cruikshank suggests, the ways in which citizens are made: what she calls the “technologies of citizenship” (for instance, the pedagogic programs, the social services, the social movements) through which modern democratic societies produce members capable of acting politically—and inclined to act politically—to advance their individual and their shared interests.

In February of 1995, following the disastrous December 1994 devaluation of the Mexican peso, which sent incomes down temporarily by as much as 60% and threw more than a million laborers out of work, the nonagenarian labor leader Fidel Velasquez issued a curious statement. He declared that each Mexican worker (earning on average at that time about six dollars a day) should pledge one day's pay toward Mexico's external debt to show solidarity with Mexico's 24 ailing billionaires, some of whom were now merely several-hundred-millionaires. In a country where jokes are often the most telling form of popular political commentary, nobody knew whether to laugh or cry at doddering Velasquez's exhortation. After all, his long record as an advocate of painful wage caps and government downsizing suggested that he actually might be serious.

One of the sharpest and most consequential divisions in international relations lies between those who believe that international politics is a realm unto its own and those who see the lines between domestic and international politics as both permeable and pertinent. For the former group, the consequences of anarchy swamp any potential for politics to be ordered at the international level as it is within states. In this view, the dynamics of domestic political life, such as the rule of law, norms of trust, or the independent effects of institutions, are foreign to the international system.

The essays in this short volume address three themes: the characterization of political campaign television advertising, the need to measure its effects, and the role and implications of issue advertising. This is an ambitious agenda, but the book makes some important contributions to the literature on campaigns and on political ads specifically.