This is a book with two separate purposes: to demonstrate the scope and diversity of institutional analysis, and to account for the rise of, and limitations to the rise of, neoliberalism as a politico-economic phenomenon. The authors therefore have both a methodological and a substantive aim. There is no reason that a book should not have two purposes in this way, and, especially given the firm editorial hand of John Campbell and Ove Pedersen, this particular exercise succeeds. But the whole remains less than the sum of its parts. Inevitably one or the other component becomes the dominant one, and in this case, it is the display of both the diversity of and capacity for convergence within institutional analysis. The work is unable to serve as a thoroughgoing analysis and critique of neoliberalism, because this becomes an object of study from the varying perspectives of the 13 contributors, rather than being built into a coherent, developing thesis. This would probably have required a single author or small group of authors, rather than the editors-pluscontributors format. Institutional analysis is, however, confronted cumulatively, because the internal organization of the book is based around different approaches to such analysis, rather than around different aspects of neoliberalism. The primary value of the whole therefore lies in its account of the state of this particular art; readers mainly concerned with the substantive study of neoliberalism will look more to individual chapters than the overall work.

The politics of gender relations, as a critical element in the construction of and resistance to power in the Age of Empire, has been the focus of a range of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Middle East, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Colonial officials such as Lord Cromer (in Egypt) and Lord Curzon (in India) often relied on discussions of the subjugated status of “native” women to articulate the moral imperative of the colonizer's “civilizing mission.” Meanwhile, the intersection of gender and power was a key element in the formation of anticolonial nationalist movements and in the process of state building throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mounira M. Charrad's book makes a significant contribution to this growing body of literature.

The central proposition advanced in this book is that incremental reform along neoliberal lines works. In Costa Rica, a slow-paced program of macroeconomic stabilization, fiscal cutbacks, economic deregulation, tax incentives for exporters, cessation of agricultural subsidies, and selected privatizations yielded “generally positive results” (p. 105). The economy recovered rapidly from the 1980s crisis and poverty rates fell back to precrisis levels, while the country's democratic stability was never in danger.

Josep M. Colomer's new book is a happy marriage of social choice theory with comparative politics. The book serves simultaneously as a primer to social choice and its empirical applications, as a theory of the evolution of political institutions, and as a normative argument in favor of inclusive, complex, and nonmajoritarian decision rules in democracies. On all these counts, Political Institutions is well worth reading, and including on syllabi.

Early studies of European integration presumed either the erosion and gradual disappearance of the nation-state (neofunctionalism) or its persistence and continued capacity to shape the integration process (intergovernmentalism). In both cases, the focus was on the supranational (European) level. For neofunctionalists, institutions and processes at the European level would eventually supplant those at the national level in importance, while for intergovernmentalists, the supranational level was the arena of bargaining and deal making between relatively coherent and self-interested states. The directional flow of activity and influence was from the national to the supranational, with national bureaucratic and nongovernmental actors shifting their interests and loyalties to the European level, or domestic actors seeking to shape national bargaining goals and strategies in the European arena.

Launching into Cyberspace provides a comparative analysis of the impact of the Internet on international relations. Focusing on five large and diverse regions of the world: Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia (India and China), Marcus Franda demonstrates that any analysis of the impact of the Internet has to take into account that the process of the integration and diffusion of information communication technologies (ICTs) varies enormously, not just from one region to the next but often from country to country. Consequently, the political scientist should be wary of drawing generalized conclusions about the impact of the Internet globally. Indeed, in many ways Franda's account of its impact provides a healthy degree of skepticism to many of the more technologically deterministic and “libertarian” accounts of the impact of ICTs. His account demonstrates that in nearly all of the countries examined, far from “withering away,” the state has played a decisive role either in creating a conducive environment for the Internet to develop or, conversely, in retarding its development by adopting regulations to administer and control access.

For a blow-by-blow historical narrative of the evolution of Japanese monetary and fiscal policy from the Plaza agreement to the point at which the American recession was beginning to nip Japanese recovery in the bud, this book would be hard to beat. It is a lucid, cogent account, based on a wealth of documentary and interview sources—albeit sometimes with a bit too much reliance on hindsight-rich analysis and self-justifying memoirs, rather than press reports of the policy arguments as they were presented at the time.

The European Commission is the powerhouse of the European Union. While its role in some respects does not look too different from most national bureaucracies—the formulation and implementation of policy—it is a much more powerful and influential administration than its national counterparts. The Commission acts with extraordinary autonomy from elected officials; if the Commission is stronger than national bureaucracies, the European Parliament is one of the weaker elected assemblies in Europe. Furthermore, the Commission has extensive rights (“a constitutional obligation”; p. 6) to initiate legislative processes, something that tends to tilt the politicobureaucratic playing field in its favor.

The questions of when and why new political parties decide to form and contest elections in established democracies are not new, but they have grown in importance over the last two decades. The rise of postmaterialist and nationalist parties across Western Europe has led to an increased focus on the causal factors involved in the formation and electoral success of new parties. In this new book, Simon Hug attempts to move beyond existing studies to create generalizable hypotheses capable of predicting when we should expect these phenomena to occur. It is innovative both in terms of its approach, which is explicitly game-theoretic, and in its goal to move toward a truly generalizable theory of new party formation (and, to some degree, success). Although there are some theoretical as well as empirical weaknesses in the work, Hug has made a laudable effort in his attempts to move the analysis of new party development beyond the bulk of existing descriptive case or class studies.

Wade Jacoby's scholarly study successfully marries theory to a detailed, specialized knowledge about the history, political culture, and politics of Germany. German specialists will find plenty of insights, but Jacoby's theoretical framework—parsimonious yet central in its limitation to two crucial variables— stands out. It will stimulate all those interested in the transfer of institutions and, more generally, the transfer of democratic capitalism. For example, the decade-old transitions in Central and Eastern Europe have been referred to as “negotiated” and “imitative revolutions,” but often the implications of such pronouncements are assumed but not explored. Jacoby's study supplies important answers to questions about the conditions that are most likely to render institutional transfer effective—in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

This edited volume, assembled by Kornai and his colleagues, addresses a vital topic in the study of postcommunist societies. Now that the “heroic phase” of rapid political and economic change is over, it seems clear that a long road remains ahead—a slow slog of step-bystep reforms through each sector of government and society in an effort to create a modern state. How should this process take place? Leaders and analysts alike desperately need a road map.

An important contribution to the emerging literature on Europeanization, this book explores the extent to which there is cultural convergence in the European Union. It focuses on four case studies: alcohol policies in Finland and Sweden, “recreational” drug policy in the Netherlands, and abortion policy in Ireland. Paulette Kurzer concludes that there has been very moderate cultural convergence in relation to these sensitive policies, although EU membership is merely one dimension of change, with the EU becoming part of the tool kit of those advocating change by providing a discourse around which discussion that may lead to change can emerge.

Henry Laurence compares the pathways to and consequences of financial reform in Britain and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. In each instance, reform was pushed on the government by a new international financial reality and by the heavy pressure the governments were under to pull their ailing economies out of the economic doldrums. Laurence's main theoretical attention centers on the Japanese case; the British case is dealt with in less detail and is used mainly to provide comparison. As a former London-based fund manager for a Japanese bank, Laurence had firsthand experience with many of the events he describes. His academic training provided him with the necessary theoretical tools to analyze the cases and put them in context.

For some, governance is a weasel word, meaning all things to everyone, but to others it stands for a shift in public management from service delivery using bureaucracy and markets to steering networks of public, private, and voluntary organizations. Robert Leach and Janie Percy-Smith document this shift to network management among British local authorities. Traditionally in Britain, local government has been viewed positively, while the netherworld of other local bodies is deemed “illegitimate.” Leach and Percy-Smith want to make “local governance” respectable while confronting the practical problems posed by the emerging new system.

In this book, José Magone addresses the important yet neglected topic of trade unionism in the European Union. He examines two related dynamics: 1) the role of interest groups, and specifically trade unions, in shaping European integration; and 2) the impact of multilevel governance structures on trade unions, particularly in Portugal and Spain. The first part of the book analyzes the concept and reality of multilevel governance in the EU. The second part analyzes the evolution of national systems of interest intermediation and trade union strategies in Portugal and Spain in light of democratization and European integration. The third part assesses the subnational and transnational polices of the Iberian trade union confederations.

For students of social democracy, the big debate of the contemporary era concerns change: Has the Left been transformed in fundamental ways over the past decades, and if so, how and why? Gerassimos Moschonas's new book attempts to give a definitive answer to at least the first of these questions by marshaling an impressive amount of evidence in a wide range of areas relevant to the development of social democracy. As the book title indicates, he falls firmly into the camp of those who believe that the Left has indeed undergone a “great transformation.” As he puts it: “[A]ccording to the central hypothesis of this book … we are witnessing a recasting of the European social democracies … [it is] the end of a political and social cycle” (p. 6). But Moschonas understands that such a claim alone is both commonplace and unhelpful; a real contribution to the debate requires clearly delineating what social democracy was and what it has become, and as anyone who knows the literature on social democracy can attest, this is easier said than done.

This volume traces the origins of clientelism, defined as “the trade of votes and other types of partisan support in exchange for public decisions with divisible benefits” (p. 4), in eight European countries: England, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. It has two main goals: to identify the incentives that make clientelism feasible or unacceptable, and to challenge the view recently advanced by Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work 1993) that polities can be nicely divided between clientelist polities (i.e., those in which particular interests are promoted) and civic polities (i.e., those in which particular interests are expressed as part of the general interest).

The reader of this book wonders whether Shinder Purewal chose the title with a view to appropriately reflect his analytical approach, or simply because categories such as “ethnicity” and “ethnonationalism” reflect a mainstream paradigm in the social sciences of the 1980s and 1990s. Purewal has chosen the concept of “Sikh ethnonationalism” in the title of the book only to reject what the reviewer feels are its most basic assumptions and, instead, privileged a rather traditional Marxian politicaleconomy approach that relies heavily on class as the fundamental analytical and explanatory category. From this perspective, ethnicity is merely a resource for the dominant class to mobilize the masses for its own narrow economic and political interest. Therefore, “The Political Economy of Punjab” is much more fitting for the author's main argument.

Until recently, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was a newly fledged opposition group trying to find its place in the turbulent process of Taiwan's democratization. But in March 2000, the DPP's candidate, Chen Shuibian, won the presidency, and in December 2001, the DPP replaced the former ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), as the largest party in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan. This dramatic rise to power and the party's current policies and future evolution are greatly illuminated by Shelley Rigger's up-close account of the DPP's history, organization, policies, and personnel.

The 1980s may have been a “lost decade” for Latin America as a whole, but it certainly was not for Indian movements across the continent. During the 1980s, regional and national-level Indian organizations grew in number and strength. Indians launched political movements (and in some cases political parties) during the 1990s in Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and, perhaps most impressively, Ecuador. In June of 1990, Ecuador was paralyzed for days as Indians across the country blocked highways, occupied local government offices, organized land invasions, and marched on the capital, Quito—thousands strong.