The controversy surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential election has already generated major scholarly work and will do so for years to come. Both works reviewed here were written before the historic judicial events surrounding the November election of 2000. Far from irrelevant, each work offers unique insight into the fundamental rules surrounding political conflict and the historical flow of elections with major social and economic change. As such, we learn much about political science and the struggle over the proper analytical lens for understanding politics.

An interesting aspect of life at Duke is the annual construction of our local Brigadoon. The well-ordered but ephemeral tent city is named “Krzyzewskiville,” after Duke's head basketball coach. K-ville appears once a year in the weeks before the game against UNC-Chapel Hill, our arch rival. So many students want to see this game that an elaborate nonprice rationing scheme, based on a queue, has evolved to allocate tickets. “Tenting” students may have to wait two weeks or more to get tickets. The game is in January or early February, so they sleeping outside and try to keep up with their school work despite rain, snow, and subfreezing temperatures at night. Random checks (even in the middle of the night) are conducted by student representatives; if a tent is empty too often it is taken down, and the residents lose their place in the queue.

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.

In The Courts of International Trade: Judicial Specialization, Expertise, and Bureaucratic Policymaking, Isaac Unah has ventured into territory that has remained largely uncharted by scholars of judicial politics. With the prominent exception of Lawrence Baum's work on specialized courts, few researchers in political science have chosen to explore courts that fall outside the federal judiciary's core hierarchy. Yet as Unah points out, these specialized courts, including the U.S. Tax Court, Claims Court, Court of International Trade, Bankruptcy Courts, and the Federal Circuit, perform critical functions that have the potential to affect business interests and shape bureaucratic performance in highly complex regulatory and economic areas. In this book, and in his previous published research, Unah has initiated an important expedition into unfamiliar but promising terrain.

At the end of the Clinton era, it is appropriate for political scientists to undertake analyses of this two-term president's effect on any number of political and public policy phenomena. Clinton's most obvious talent showed itself in the electoral arena, where (even in a television era) he formed deeply personal relationships with voters, and many of these analyses rightfully focus on the foundations of Clinton's public support. Continuing this line of research, Hanes Walton examines a potential explanation for Clinton's relative strength in one region of the country—the turf on which his political career began—through an in-depth analysis of Clinton's electoral base across time in Arkansas and the South. The book examines a well-justified question, about the ongoing vitality of a “native son” phenomenon but numerous problems with the method by which Walton attempts to answer that question weaken this work. Numerous factual errors and muddled writing make it even more problematic.

When we talk about the gender gap, students in my Women and Politics course are always surprised to learn that men used to be more likely than women to support the Democratic Party and that Republicans were the original supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Many people forget, or are not familiar with, the significant party transformations on these issues over the last 50 years. Christina Wolbrecht's new book provides important insights into this transformation and is a valuable contribution. The study of political parties has not, to date, accounted for this phenomenon, and gender studies too often ignore the crucial role of political parties in our system.

It is a pleasure to review this well-written book, which should be of enormous interest to every serious student of judicial politics and the presidency. Based upon a thorough mining of the presidential papers of seven presidents and numerous interviews with key participants in the selection process, along with other primary and secondary sources, Yalof gives us a presidency-by-presidency take on the recruitment of Supreme Court nominees.

Of all the “traumatic transitions” in the postcommunist world, the Russian one ranks as one of the most tortuous and painful. Why is this? Does the problem lie in the institutional structure created in the early postcommunist years, or do the roots lie deeper, in Russia's innate authoritarianism and cult of strong leadership? Employing the concept of political culture, this is the question that Alexander seeks to answer. He approaches the idea in an unusual way, however, by focusing rather more broadly on the concept of “culture” and its potential for change rather than any narrowly defined notion of “political” culture. He insists that a nation's political culture cannot be reduced to one or two simple and measurable parameters but is a complex web of malleable relations and contradictions; and he seeks to understand them by using what he insists are nonstandard approaches.

International meetings about health-care issues—conferences, symposia, cyber-gatherings—have become something of an epidemic in the past decade. There is a brisk trade in the latest panaceas offered for the various real and imagined ills of modern medical care systems. When policy fixes fail in their country of origin, they are regularly offered to unsuspecting audiences elsewhere. Moreover, what travels as comparative analysis is often simply a collection of parallel descriptions of national health arrangements. So when there is a flurry of systematic comparative studies of health care by political scientists, a development illustrated by the four books under review, one ought to pay attention.

Max Azicri writes with acumen on the Cuban revolution in the very different decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and he offers an insightful assessment of the changes and challenges of the 1990s. His objective is to answer the puzzle of what he calls the “Cuban miracle”: the island's surprising survival in the face of the deep economic crisis associated with the collapse of the socialist bloc and the ongoing “punitive” policies of the United States. Azicri is not the only scholar to attempt an interpretation of Cuba in the 1990s. Susan Eckstein (Back from the Future: Cuba Under Castro, 1994), Ken Cole (Cuba: From Revoution to Development, 1998), Julia Jatar-Hausman (The Cuban Way: Capitalism, Communism, and Confrontation, 1999), and Robin Blackburn, (“Putting the Hammer Down on Cuba,” New Left Review, July-August 2000 (4): 5–36) are among those who have examined the nexus of Cuba's past and future in the post–Cold War context. An explosion of travel writing also demonstrates the intrigue of contemporary Cuba, as does the list of new detective thrillers—some of them bestsellers—with a Cuba setting. Azicri's book has a distinctive place in this literary landscape.

Elections and Democratization in Ukraine represents a valuable contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of party systems development in postcommunist politics. Unlike many volumes that rely on largely anecdotal evidence and narrative, this book is extremely well organized and systematic. There is a clear theoretical structure, and systematic evidence is employed to test specific hypotheses. Using some of the classic works on the development of party systems and relations between parties and voters to provide a theoretical framework, the author derives a set of hypotheses about characteristics that might affect voter choices over time.

One defining feature of a constitutional democracy is that the defeat of the governing party in a general election leads to a peaceful, orderly, and more or less routine change of government. Given the inherently combative nature of electoral politics and the potential for disruptive action by the losing side, this is no small achievement, and when it happens it is justly celebrated. Transitions in constitutional regimes, moreover, provide a unique if momentary window through which to view the mainsprings of political power. This volume is a study of the 1995 transition from New Democratic Party (NDP) to Progressive Conservative (PC) rule in the province of Ontario. It makes an important contribution to the sparse literature on transitions in Canada and in parliamentary regimes generally. For students of comparative government, it usefully complements recent work on presidential transitions in the United States, particularly Charles O. Jones, Passages to the Presidency: From Campaigning to Governing (1998).

These books address the same issue, the democratization of Taiwan, but use diametrically opposed analytic frameworks. The results are individually unsatisfying but, paradoxically, complementary.

Ronald Chilcote is a leading radical political economist, and this book is a fine illustration of his well-earned reputation. It is a comprehensive survey of most of the major writers and themes that have dominated the literature on liberal and radical political economy, organized historically and by schools of thought around key concepts: class, state, imperialism, and transitions. The core of the book focuses on these four conceptual areas.

Religion has played a prominent role in Israel's history. The country was founded in 1948 with a declaration of being a Jewish state, not only a state for the Jews. This definition has been the source of two thorny problems. The first involves the relations between state and religion, the second the relationship between two communities, namely, the secular majority and the religious minority. The two books under review tackle these problems in a fascinating manner. They complement each other by presenting different aspects of the intricate religious issue in Israel. They also contradict each other by offering conflicting conclusions based on historical and contemporary analysis.

As the Soviet regime recedes farther into the past, two types of scholars are now working hard to put the post-Soviet experience in comparative context. Some are those who built their careers on a study of the Soviet Union and have now significantly expanded on their work, while another group comprises scholars of the post-Soviet regime who completed their dissertations after the collapse of the Communist regime. These two books represent some of the best of both of these groups, and both are important in their scope in bringing Russian politics into one of the most important fields in politics, namely, that of elections, parties, and voters.

Studies of Asian politics tend to follow one of two divergent analytic strategies. Area specialists emphasize the importance of Asian culture in shaping the politics and economics of those nations, whereas comparative theorists apply broader models of political behavior to the Asian context. Robert Compton seeks to integrate these two traditions, which generally speak past one another, by proposing a promising (albeit somewhat limited) model of the dynamics of democratization in East and Southeast Asia. The model explicitly incorporates the distinctive cultures of these nations as the central causal factor explaining the process of democratization and the characteristics of the democratic polities that have emerged in the region. Furthermore, in terms of normative questions, Compton uses this analysis to critique both sides in the current debate between advocates of democracy and critics who claim that democracy is incompatible with “Asian values.'' Thus, East Asian Democratization should be of interest to a wide variety of scholars concerned with Asian politics or with theories of democratization.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church is seen as an obstacle to progressive social and political change in Latin America. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the Second Vatican Council and the growth of liberation theology prompted doctrinal and institutional changes in the church in Brazil and several other countries. From an ally of the conservative oligarchy and establishment, the church turned into an engine of mobilization for grassroots movements and a focal point for popular opposition to authoritarian governments. One of the more significant and widely researched changes in the “popular church” was the establishment of thousands of ecclesiastical base communities (CEBs) among the poor. The fact that the majority of CEB participants are women has received far less attention.

Drawing on a wealth of new information made available by the opening of the Comintern archives, Drew sheds the light of hindsight on the relationship between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and, in turn, the Soviet Comintern, the South African liberation movement, and the white and black trade union movements in the first half of the twentieth century. This rich book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of ties between the Comintern and its satellite parties as well as the early history of the South African antiapartheid movement. There are only two other major books on this period of party history, and both are memoirs of party members who try to establish a particular version of the record. Drew contests the teleology of their accounts of communist party history and instead weaves a contingent narrative that identifies major turning points that narrowed the possibility for a radical reorientation of the party (p. 281). It was not inevitable that the party would split and finally dissolve in the way it did—other outcomes were possible, almost until the end. That they were not taken was the layered result of personal and ideological rivalries and party alliances that made socialism, and socialists, perpetually weak and vulnerable in the context of South African politics.

Over the past decade, Russia's attempted transition to a market economy has attracted a great deal of scholarly interest. Given the complexities at hand and the rather disappointing outcome, it is natural that debates have been acrimonious at times. Some have argued that we are witnesses to a great success; others, that we are seeing a monumental failure. A book that promises to deal with “building market institutions in Russia” might harbor yet another contribution to such debates, but that is not case. Timothy Frye is careful to note (on p. 12) that his book “does not attempt a holistic analysis of the process of economic and political reform in Russia.”