The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. By Ange-Marie Hancock. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 216p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Even the casual observer of politics knows that the very mention of the word “welfare” elicits a visceral, negative reaction from many (e.g., see Tom W. Smith, “That Which We Call Welfare by Any Other Name Would Smell Sweeter,” Public Opinion Quarterly 51 [Fall 1987]: 75–83). In The Politics of Disgust, Ange-Marie Hancock explains that this reaction is a result of the well-ingrained public identity of the welfare recipient, an identity that so marginalizes this group as to lead to their almost complete exclusion from the political process.

Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism. By Marc J. Hetherington. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 208p. $35.00.

Fifteen years after the signing of the Social Security Act, this already broad government program was expanded. With the amendments of 1950, an additional 10 million additional people were covered, including some of the poorest—domestic and agricultural workers. By using the payroll tax to support Social Security payments, citizens saw the program as one to which they contributed and from which they should receive. Even in very different times 55 years later, Americans continued to support this approach to public pensions. Despite comparatively low levels of trust in government and decades of antitax and antigovernment movement successes, President George W. Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security fell flat.

Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics. Edited by William G. Howell. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. 356p. $19.77.

In college and university towns across the United States, academics are regular fixtures on local public school boards. In search of a way to meet our civic duty, we seem to be drawn naturally to school boards more than other local public institutions. This is a guess, of course, and it is one of the few things one cannot find data on in this collection of essays on the work that has been done by and to school boards in the last decade. If the intuition that academics tend to romanticize local school boards is only half right, these rigorous, fine-grained essays on one area of education politics will intrigue more than just political scientists.

Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism. By Thad Kousser. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 288p. $ 70.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Thad Kousser is interested in both term limits and legislative professionalism because they effect fundamental changes in the environment in which lawmakers work. Drawing upon Richard Fenno's paradigm, the author assumes that legislators will behave rationally, seeking to maximize their ability to win elections, affect policy, and gain influence in their chambers. How, he asks, do legislative professionalism and term limits alter the ways in which legislators do “transformative” work: 1) change budgets and 2) innovate in pursuance of their goals? And how do the alterations in the “internal power dynamics” of legislatures resulting from these reforms—3) the stability of leadership, 4) the independence of committees, and 5) the capacity for individual achievement—shape members' goal-seeking behavior?

The Political Economy of the Living Wage: A Study of Four Cities. By Oren M. Levin-Waldman. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004. $69.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Fighting for a Living Wage. By Stephanie Luce. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 288p. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

While the idea of a living wage is traceable back to concerns about the status of wage earners in a republican political order voiced during the Jacksonian era, the modern history of the movement began in Baltimore in 1994. A coalition of unions, liberal religious groups, and organizations that work with and for the poor persuaded the city council to adopt a policy requiring all firms with city contracts to pay their employees a living wage. From there, the movement has spread to other parts of the country, resulting in about 130 similar ordinances at last count. These two books are the latest in a growing literature covering various facets of this phenomenon.

Voting the Agenda: Candidates, Elections and Ballot Propositions. By Stephen P. Nicholson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 208p. $35.00

Many good books are published in political science, but rarely is one so powerful that it restructures the study of politics in multiple subfields. Stephen Nicholson's Voting the Agenda may be such a book, as it forces scholars to reconsider how we study not only voting and elections but also Congress, the presidency, state legislatures, governors, direct democracy, the media, and political campaigns.

How Management Matters: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Welfare Reform. By Norma M. Riccucci. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 224p. $26.95.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) famously ended welfare “as we knew it”—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—and replaced the 60-year-old AFDC with a new program pointedly called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. TANF substantially increased state discretion in choosing how to aid families with children, but it also established various process requirements that were intended to increase efforts to move unemployed adult recipients into jobs. The new regulations generally require close interaction between benefit recipients (often disingenuously termed “customers”) and local agency personnel. Presumably, it is in these interactions that recipient understanding of the nature and terms of public assistance is to some extent formed. If it is the objective of welfare reform to change these perceptions, reform must address what happens when those seeking help encounter the system.

Alienated: Immigrant Rights, The Constitution, and Equality in America. By Victor C. Romero. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 320p. $42.00.

Victor Romero is convinced that the Constitution, properly understood, extends to all people living in the United States, citizens and noncitizens alike, the same constitutional and statutory rights. That is the theme of his book. Romero concedes that the federal judiciary has failed, as often as not, to provide this parity—in part because it vacillates uneasily between the so-called personhood and membership paradigms—between guaranteeing every person, regardless of immigration status, due process and equal protection of the laws, and deferring almost reflexively to the political branches whenever it is confronted with issues involving the admission or deportation of aliens.

This Is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles. By Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 192p. $56.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Jean Baudrillard once argued that “there is no theory of the media” (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 1981, p. 164). Perhaps one might say the same in regard to a theory of culture, but Ronald Schmidt helps move us toward a better understanding of both. His book helps us recognize the link between the media and political culture. Akin to Baudrillard, Schmidt discusses the rhetoric and images used by the economic and political elite to reinforce the latent social and political hierarchies in society.

The Supreme Court in the American Legal System. By Jeffrey A. Segal, Harold J. Spaeth, and Sara C. Benesh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 416p. $75.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

If there is any example of a Kuhnian paradigm in political science, it would be the attitudinal model in Supreme Court decision making. Over a half century ago, C. Herman Pritchett boldly showed data that revealed “political” decision making by the justices of the nation's high court. Harold Spaeth was among the pioneers in this research and is now regarded as its strongest adherent. The justification for the Supreme Court Attitudinal Model, known to friends and foes alike by the acronym “SCAM,” is relatively simple: The preponderance of individual-level decision making can be explained as a function of the attitudes of the justices. Like the ideal model, it is parsimonious and explains a great deal of variance. Even those who have been critical of SCAM concede that the attitudes of the justices are the most important determinant of individual-level decision making at the Supreme Court level.

Morality Politics in American Cities. By Elaine B. Sharp. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 288p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Elaine Sharp's book examines the political climate and specifics of the local policy debate, authorization, and implementation associated with a number of controversial issues: casino gambling projects and regulation/prohibition of “sex industries,” as well as municipal support for/opposition to gay rights and provision of abortion and addiction services. Using the blanket notion of morality politics to characterize these matters, Sharp looks at local-level political/policy debates in 10 metropolitan areas during the 1990s. With this number of cities available for comparative analysis, she structures her numerous city/issue narratives by way of four independent variables: local cultural climate, local economic climate, municipal institutional structure, and intergovernmental relationships.

Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics. By James A. Stimson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 206p. $55.00 cloth, $16.99 paper.

The main goal of James A. Stimson's book is to show how the dynamics of public opinion impinge on the the American political process. This is a broad and potentially difficult task, particularly for such a succinct text. Nevertheless, I believe the book achieves its objectives quite convincingly.

Japan's Financial Crisis: Institutional Rigidity and Reluctant Change. By Jennifer A. Amyx. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. 408p. $39.50.

Recently, the puzzle of the unexpected and never-ending Japanese financial crisis has eluded Japan specialists and comparative political economists alike. How could the same institutions generate an overperforming economy for more than three decades and a decade-long crisis? How could a system once praised for its ability to handle economic shocks such as the two oil shocks and a massive reevaluation of the Yen suddenly stall and prove unable to adapt to changing conditions? How could the greatest creditor and capital exporter of the planet have such weak financial regulations? Scholars have disagreed on both the diagnostics and the causes of the crisis. While some have focused on mistakes in fiscal or monetary policy, others have emphasized a systemic breakdown. While some have emphasized domestic political factors (be they interest groups, party politics, electoral system, or bureaucratic dominance), others have focused on external factors.

Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990–2001. By Leslie E. Anderson and Lawrence C. Dodd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 336p. $24.00.

In opposition to the recent trend in democratization studies that sees this process as if the glass is half empty, this study of Nicaraguan democratization argues that the glass is half full. Recent history in Nicaragua includes momentous events, such as the fall of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, the subsequent Sandinista electoral victory in the presidential contest of 1984, and their later defeat in 1990, when voters rejected Daniel Ortega in favor of the mild-mannered, conservative Violeta Chamorro. Noting the voters' continuous embrace of what the authors call “democratic conservatism,” they conclude that “Nicaragua appears to be evolving into an inclusive, constitutional democracy” (p. 280). How was this possible, especially in a country that exhibited so few of the prerequisites traditionally associated with the successful establishment of democracy? And why did voters, the majority of them poor, reject the Sandinistas in 1990 and later elections, favoring candidates that came to undo most of what the Sandinistas had achieved in terms of social and economic equality? These are the most important questions Leslie Anderson and Lawrence Dodd seek to elucidate in this suggestive and informative book.

A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe. By Hilary Appel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 248p. $27.95.

This book provides a valuable analysis of the role of ideology in the development of mass privatization programs in postcommunist countries. Mass privatization was a unique program that defined postcommunist economic transitions in the 1990s and was adopted in numerous countries. Launched first in the Czech Republic in 1991, this innovative method of privatization was adopted in many other postcommunist countries. The rationale for mass privatization was simple: Since people did not have the money to buy state-owned enterprises, the state could give them away. To distribute ownership widely throughout the formerly expropriated population, the state would distribute shares in state-owned enterprises to millions of small shareholders in exchange for free or nearly free vouchers. Mass privatization would divest the state of thousands of state enterprises, while creating a broad-based class of shareholders after decades of communism.

Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish Politics. By Yesim Arat. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 150p. $55.00.

Since the advent of competitive politics in Turkey in 1946, Islamist parties have assumed increasing importance. During the 1970s, the National Salvation Party, headed by Necmettin Erbakan, was a participant in a series of coalition governments. The Welfare Party, also led by Erbakan, came in first (barely) in the 1995 election, catapulting its temperamental leader into the position of prime minister. In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) won an overwhelming electoral victory, capturing two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Although the JDP denies that it is an Islamist party, its leader, the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been a leading Islamist politician, including especially his stormy career as mayor of Istanbul, and both its supporters and opponents regard it as such today. The result of this dramatic rise of Islamist political forces in the formally and solidly secular Republic of Turkey has aroused a great deal of controversy. Not least of the questions raised is the popular conundrum of the compatibility of Islam and democracy.

The Future of the Welfare State: Crisis Myths and Crisis Realities. By Francis Castles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 208p. $99.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

As Francis Castles observes, quantitative comparative political economy has generated a “cacophony” of explanations for the welfare state crisis from 1980 to 1998. Political economists have identified causal factors including globalization, de-industrialization, population aging, declining birth rates, weak economic performance, welfare program maturation, political institutions, and partisanship. To Castles, however, these explanations rest on faulty empirical evidence. Methodological problems—in particular, unreliable comparative social expenditure data and overreliance on pooled designs and statistical techniques—have made it impossible to distinguish “crisis myths” from “crisis realities.” His proposed solution is to combine cross-national designs with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's SOCX database on social spending, and he argues that doing so reveals that dominant theories are myths. His sweeping account is a spirited contribution, but it is bound to attract significant criticism.

Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology. By Hiram E. Chodosh. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 240p. $45.00.

This book is a greatly needed assessment of the methodologies used to study and implement justice reform. By asking a range of pointed questions on judicial reform whose answers have largely been assumed, Hiram E. Chodosh lays bare basic concepts and debates in order to understand whether they are truly logical, consistent, and useful. The scrutiny with which the author subjects the field of comparative law helps make it much more rigorous, since, as he points out, even an empirically rich comparative framework will result in poor findings if its methodology is inconsistent and its objectives unclear. He carefully explains comparative method, illuminates approaches ranging from cross-national comparisons to intranational comparisons, and analyzes benefits of comparisons, such as the creation of continuums. With this comprehensive and insightful assessment, he criticizes comparative law's failure to adopt a method for objectively assessing the results and value of a comparison that is “flexible enough to grasp a wide variety” of processes and institutions (p. 17). He shows how classifications, prototypes, evaluation mechanisms, and other building blocks of comparative study are often too deterministic or unclear, and how the lack of objective criteria leaves central debates—such as over the wisdom and practicality of transferring a feature of one country's legal system to another—unresolved. “Without clarity of purpose,” he concludes,” it is difficult to determine the content of what to report” (p. 16).

Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective. By Jon Elster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 310 p. $26.95.

This book makes an important contribution to the evolving field of transitional justice on both a theoretical and a practical level. In terms of theory, it ably complements other volumes in this area, such as those written or edited by Neil Kritz, James McAdams, Ruti Teitel and James Gibson, and others. On a practical level, it provides a conceptual framework, analyses, and conclusions from which countries undergoing transition from authoritarian rule, civil war, or violent conflict can draw in order to make informed choices.

Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany. By Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224p. $60.00 cloth, $14.99 paper.

The central question of Joel Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper's well-written and highly accessible book—how to explain the disparate political responses to the religious concerns of Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany—is clearly important. Indeed, while the question was pertinent before the tragedy of September 11 in 2001 and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, it has become exponentially more urgent since. Although the difficulties of incorporating Muslim populations into the countries receiving them were neither a cause of nor directly connected to the aforementioned events, the negative chain reaction they subsequently precipitated within and outside of the diverse Muslim community within Western Europe nevertheless exposed serious tensions between many of the community's religious practices and the dominant cultural, social, and political mores of the host societies. In short, the answer to the book's organizing question very much matters for Western Europe's political, religious, and social tranquility.