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).

This book, the product of collaboration by an international team of European social scientists, focuses on the emergence and operation of local partnerships to combat social exclusion in European Union nations. This timely study is built on case analysis of samples of local partnerships in 10 EU nations; seven are given chapter-length treatment in the book. The central goals of the authors are to explain the cross-national diversity in frequency and form of local partnerships and their successes and failures in addressing poverty and social exclusion.

The core message of this book comes through clearly in every chapter: Formal political institutions affect economic policymaking and—less directly—policy results. The book advances thinking about how institutions affect policymaking, especially about how political institutions affect the stability (or resoluteness) and adaptability (or decisiveness) of policy.

This book is the result of a five-year research project that had as its goal the reform of the committee system in the Israeli Knesset. It had the full support of the leadership and members of that legislative body, and was conducted under the sponsorship of an important Israeli think tank, the Israel Democracy Institute. In undertaking this investigation, Reuvan Y. Hazan quickly discovered an additional reason for devoting so much time to this subject—the challenge of addressing “a flagrant deficiency in the political science literature” (p. 2), the dearth of comparative literature on parliamentary reform of committees.

For the field of Russian comparative politics, the collapse of Soviet communism abruptly shifted attention from commissars and commanders to businessmen and bankers. Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly evident that a small cohort of newly rich financiers was influencing the course of Russia's transition. Yet it was not always clear in what ways and to what extent these upstart tycoons were acting as political players. With this book, the field at last has an authoritative, systematic rendering of the banking sector. Juliet Johnson chronicles the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia's big bankers during the postcommunist regime's formative decade.

As its title indicates, this book explores the links between institutions and innovation—specifically, between electoral systems and parties' capacity to innovate. The latter, in turn, is considered a crucial determinant of democratic performance because it shapes parties' capacity in times of economic crisis to offer policy prescriptions sufficiently attractive to limit voter defection to nondemocratic alternatives.

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.

John McGarry and a distinguished group of comparativists have produced a volume important not only for scholars interested in the study of Northern Ireland but also for those concerned with ethnic conflict and nationalism generally. Although its success is certainly not assured, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a consociational (power-sharing) settlement of the Northern Ireland conflict with international confederal dimensions, has sparked much interest by scholars and practitioners concerned with other ethnonational conflicts. The agreement was achieved with considerable pressure and support from international actors. The international community has played an increasingly important part in the resolution, management, and containment of ethnonational conflict, and the success or failure of the Good Friday Agreement may hold important lessons for international efforts elsewhere. From both a theoretical and practical perspective, this is a fine edited volume with internal coherence and useful contributions.

In Rational Choice and British Politics, Iain McLean applies William Riker's concept of “heresthetics” to British political history. In contrast to rhetoric (the art of persuasion), heresthetics is “the art and science of political manipulation” (p. 10). Rather than trying to convince others of one's position, heresthetics is about transforming the question and altering political dimensions so as to change the rational calculus of key actors and manufacture a supportive coalition. McLean employs the device of “analytical narratives” (historical analysis informed by rational choice methodology) to explore critical junctures in British political development, including the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Second Reform Act, the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, and the political and economic revolution of Margaret Thatcher. He also explores broader political movements, including the realignment of Victorian political parties and the attempts by Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell to connect race and empire into winning coalitions.

Nowadays, it is easy to forget just how pessimistic observers were in 1990 about the possibility of simultaneously introducing capitalism and competitive politics to the ex-socialist states of Eastern Europe. Often, debates seemed to hinge simply on which would subvert which, that is, whether the economic shocks of reform would destabilize democratic governments or whether populist appeals to the losers of economic adjustment would derail economic reform. That popularly elected government and systemic economic change could mutually reinforce each other seemed, at the time, to describe a fool's paradise. Yet now that the dust has begun to settle, this appears to have been exactly what happened.

The most challenging task in today's comparative politics is crafting a fruitful combination of a general theory of political behavior with a nontrivial and sufficiently rich portrayal of that behavior's social, cultural, and historical context. At the same time, a consensus is emerging that holism is out, individualism is in, and the discipline's intellectual effort should be primarily focused on the reconstruction of the rules (mechanisms) governing the strategizing behavior of individuals in various social and cultural contexts. Macro-historical-structural explanations are largely out of favor. Given this intellectual climate, the premium is placed on studies that employ rational choice/game theoretical framework and test its applicability and limitations in the study of non-Western political systems. Such tests of applicability inevitably involve a confrontation between slim and parsimonious game-theoretic models and detail-rich ethnographic or historical reconstructions. Sometimes such confrontations end up in fruitless, mutual acrimony; recently, however, they have led to many instances of cross-fertilization and productive revisions of both sides' analytical assumptions.

As David Pion-Berlin explains in his Introduction, this collection of essays seeks to link the field of Latin American civil-military studies to major theoretical approaches in mainstream political science. Accordingly, the contributors draw from the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches in an effort to break what the editor of this book views as a long-standing isolation of Latin Americanists in general, and the region's civil-military specialists in particular, “from the major intellectual traditions, currents, and debates in political science and in the field of comparative politics” (p. 16). Therefore, the stated purpose of this volume is to reexamine civil-military relations in Latin America, taking into account major contextual changes (the wave of democratization in the region, the transition to free market economies, the end of the Cold War) and the potential contribution of mainstream analytical perspectives to new insights into this important theme in Latin American politics.

The debate about the history and future of the welfare state is gradually expanding beyond the advanced industrial countries to encompass the middle-income developing countries and the formerly socialist economies of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This debate is particularly interesting in Asia. The newly industrializing countries in that region have had great success in increasing incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining an equitable distribution of income. At the same time, the countries in the region are highly “globalized”—a factor often associated with increased economic insecurity—and until the 1980s were for the most part ruled by labor-repressive authoritarian regimes. By traditional measures of effort, they also appear to have surprisingly shallow public commitment to social welfare.

This illuminating account of child day-care policies and practice in Britain casts a dark shadow over equality in that country. Through the exploration of the simple question of why the public provision of child care has been so meager in Britain, Vicky Randall presents a compelling account not just of policy failure but of a general disinterest in child care as an equal opportunity issue. For her, there are intrinsic flaws in British society that have hindered the provision and funding of public child care in that country. The reason for this systemic inequality is to be found, principally, in the British brand of liberalism, combined with the country's institutional structures, both of which have operated from the premise that child care is a private concern.

The fate of Russia's economic and political reforms is the subject of this interpretative history of the last years of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin period, The book provides a useful, if controversial, introduction to the events of this crucial period in Russian political development, from 1990 to 1999. Special attention is given to the events surrounding important turning points in Russian history; there are particularly detailed treatments of the August 1991 coup, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin's forcible disbanding of the parliament in October 1993. In the end, though, the large number of events the authors seek to analyze is a liability because it tends to detract from and dilute the main argument.

Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies. The dominant position in this debate posits the importance of proportional representation (PR) systems. An alternative position, less widely accepted largely because of an ostensible absence of empirical examples, posits the importance of majoritarian preferential systems that encourage cross-ethnic vote pooling. Reilly extends this debate by drawing on heretofore unknown or understudied cases to examine the operation of both majoritarian (the alternative vote or AV and the supplementary vote or SV) and proportional (single-transferable vote or STV) preferential systems in different social contexts and in different elections (legislative and presidential).

Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa is an insightful, refreshing, and original book that refines and expands our understanding of the so-called “politics of the belly.” A phrase made famous by Jean Francois Bayart (The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 1993), the politics of the belly is the phenomenon of “eating” the fruits of power. The extent to which officeholders monopolize or share these fruits with the larger community has, however, significant consequences for their legitimacy. As Michael Schatzberg suggests, a “moral matrix of legitimate governance” (p. 35) embedded in familial and paternal metaphors shapes these belly politics. In turn, he argues that the moral matrix is rooted in four major premises. The first and second are related to the image of the ruler as a “fatherchief,” who has the obligation, on the one hand, to nurture and nourish his “family,” and on the other hand, to punish his “children” when necessary and pardon them when they truly repent. The third premise concerns the status of women in society; while they are not considered equal to men, rulers should, nonetheless, respect their role as “counselors and advisers.” The fourth premise “holds that permanent power is illegitimate and that political fathers…have to let their children grow up, mature, take on ever-increasing responsibilities in the conduct of their own affairs, and eventually succeed them in power” (p. 192).

The Outsider is a study of prejudicial attitudes toward migrants in Italy. The book contributes to the study of public reactions to non-European Union immigration because it statistically analyzes opinions that are usually addressed descriptively. Moreover, the work correctly studies the interaction between individual and social responses to migration. However, the overall contribution of this book to the comparative literature on xenophobia in Europe is limited by serious theoretical and methodological flaws.

Much of the literature on environmental policymaking in the Global South focuses on the role of transnational linkages, wherein ideas regarding environmental management are transplanted by intergovernmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations in the North to governments in the South. The perception that environmental management concepts are primarily transferred in this way stems in part from the resonance that Ronald Inglehart's work on postmaterialist societies and environmental activism has had on the field, as well as a paucity of studies examining the dynamics of the domestic political players in the creation of natural resource management policies in the South. Paul Steinberg's work, Environmental Leadership in Developing Countries, addresses this particular puzzle and takes on the too-oft accepted notion that domestic policy entrepreneurs play a small supporting role at best in bringing about environmental policies in the Global South.

This book deals with the politics of abortion and abortion law reform as they have developed in 11 countries of Western Europe and North America during the period of the women's movement's second wave. The stories that are told vary a good deal, even among countries apparently similar in religious composition, political tradition, and legal culture. They include the early and comparatively uncontroversial move to allow abortion on grounds of the mother's physical or mental health in Great Britain, more radical reform in the Netherlands making early abortion available on demand, and the continuing division in Ireland where judicial affirmation of a woman's right to travel outside the country must be counted a win. It is an interesting and worthwhile book for this alone.