Politics Beyond the Capital: The Design of Subnational Institutions in South America. By Kent Eaton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 288p. $55.00.

This is a good book about an interesting and important subject: waves of centralizing and decentralizing change over time and across four different country cases. The book analyzes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay from the nineteenth century to the present. More specifically, Kent Eaton examines 30 periods of movement toward greater or lesser centralization—12 in Argentina, 6 in Brazil, 5 in Chile, and 7 in Uruguay.