Regina Lawrence makes a major contribution to the criminal justice policy literature in her book, The Politics ofForce: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality. She helps observers of the criminal justice system understand one of the reasons the crime control model is the dominant one in the United States. To do this she studies two major police departments, New York and Los Angeles, and the reporting of police use of force incidents in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, respectively. Generally, the viewpoint of the police is presented in the newspaper accounts of the incidents. The police explanation involves blaming the individual wrongdoer without any serious discussion of systemic problems in the operation of the police department. In other words, the police view reinforces the crime control model, with its stress on the rapid and efficient removal of wrongdoers from the streets of this country. Thus Lawrence helps the reader understand why the views of police critics do not receive the same level of coverage as does the official view presented to the press by the police bureaucracy. In her concern with the definition of public problems, she contributes to a theory of issue construction. The significance of her findings is reinforced by her data sources: two major American newspapers including the New York Times, which is read by political elites throughout the United States. The data in the book are based on a content analysis of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times from 1984 to 1995. Also, an extensive analysis of the Rodney King case is presented. The information about the King case was garnered from a variety of newspapers and magazines. In addition, Lawrence gathered information for her study by interviewing reporters and police experts in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities.

Although It Didn't Happen Here addresses a rather familiar question—Why is there no socialism in the United States?—this is an exciting book. Its central chapters discuss the major explanations for American “exceptionalism” that have been proposed over the past century—namely, the distinctive character of U.S. political institutions, the ethnic heterogeneity of the nation's population, the divisions between labor unions and the socialist party, the sectarianism of American socialists, the repression that radicals encountered, etc. Political scientists will find the topics of many of these chapters familiar too.

The principles of state-based representation in the Senate and “one person, one vote” reside comfortably, yet incongruously in the American political psyche. Few of us have lectured on the Senate without raising this point. We carry on about Wyoming and California and their equal number of Senators. Perhaps our lectures extend to discussion of policy issues: Would Clarence Thomas have been confirmed if the Senate were apportioned based on population? and so on. But seldom does the discussion go much further. And, strikingly, this has been true even in the academy. We have 1,001 ways to measure committee preferences, but we know relatively little about the effects of state-based representation in the Senate. Lee and Oppenheimer's book changes this state of affairs and offers an excellent account of the importance of state-based representation for the Senate and beyond.

It used to be an axiom in political science that American parties were weak. Now we are not so sure. During the 1980s and 1990s, the profession produced a great deal of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that U.S. political parties were “resurgent.” J. P. Monroe's book, The Political Party Matrix: The Persistence of Organization, provides an interesting twist on the new literature. It argues that party change is the result not so much of strengthening but of adaptation.

The public discourse on the purpose of education is dominated by functionalist or human capital theory, which argues that the primary purpose of schools is to impart to citizens skills that will be needed to compete and win in the U.S. marketplace and the global economy. This edited volume attempts to correct this imbalance by emphasizing civics education and political socialization as important functions of schools.

In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure and Legislative Reorganization Act. In this legislation, Congress purposefully provided for itself a prominent role in the administration of the federal government. David Rosenbloom writes that the “… purpose of this book is to explain how and why Congress adopted that role, its underlying coherence, [and] its durability … for seemingly ever-increasing congressional involvement in federal administration …” (p. ix). The author maintains that Congress was uneasy about this endeavor but was forced by the “federal administrative state” to reposition itself. Some even believed that Congress' place in the constitutional scheme-of-things had been altered. For example, it was asserted that Congress was abandoning constitutional principle if it allowed unelected governmental administrators to make rules (i.e., administrative law). The 1946 legislation has resulted in a merger between Congress and the federal bureaucracy. The author contends that federal agencies became “extensions” of Congress' authority to make law. In addition, this legislation resulted in the view that the administration of the bureaucracy was no longer to be seen as the private preserve of the executive branch of government. The concept of “legislative-centered public administration” is used to describe the results of this legislation.

Steven E. Schier's latest book, The Postmodern Presidency: Bill Clinton's Legacy in U.S. Politics, provides a much-needed assessment of the Clinton presidency. Throughout the eight years of the Clinton administration, surprisingly few scholarly books were written that either assessed presidential performance or examined the political implications of the Clinton presidency. The few books that did emerge from the Clinton era focus on impeachment and on Mrs. Clinton, most in a less than scholarly way. Steven Schier has begun to fill this scholarly void by putting together an edited volume that examines both performance and political repercussions of the Clinton presidency. This volume of 12 articles offers perspectives on the domestic, international, and economic policies of the administration. The contributors are all well-known scholars in presidential research and all have written significantly within their fields (i.e., domestic policy, international relations, electoral politics, etc.). Schier's choice of contributors is excellent and ensures substantial command of the subject matter within the chapters.

A not uncommon complaint concerning social choice models is that they tend to assume away everything of interest, leaving a model with little relation to the real world. The usual response is that one must start with the basic elements of a problem before moving to more complex and inclusive models. Unfortunately, few social choice models applied to legal studies have achieved sufficient complexity to be of significant value. Maxwell Stearns recognizes this problem and, in Constitutional Process, systematically presents a comprehensive social choice model and applies it to a complex legal doctrine.

There is an unfortunate tendency for much public policy analysis to be ahistorical in its perspective. A program or policy is evaluated in terms of its success or failure in achieving its stated goals, and only the most immediate social, political, and economic factors are brought into the analysis to explain policy outcomes. In the case of public housing in the United States, an analysis of its failure to meet its stated goal of providing decent housing for the poor might lead us to blame (1) the federal government for poor design of the program, (2) local governments for poor implementation, or (3) the recipients themselves for engaging in antisocial behavior that undermined the intent of the program.

Why would any legislator in the U.S. House of Representatives invest the time and energy to pass good public policy? This simple question drives Gregory Wawro's investigation of legislative entrepreneurship, which he defines as “invest[ing] time, staff, and other resources to acquire knowledge of particular policy areas, draft[ing] legislation addressing issues in those areas, and shepherd[ing] their proposals through the legislative process by building and maintaining coalitions” (p. 2). His introduction and description of the puzzle are exemplary. His answer, unfortunately, is wanting.

Jeremy Zilber and David Niven bolster a brief but cogent argument with evidence that news coverage of Congress has been “racialized” to the detriment of African-American congressmen and congresswomen, that African-American members of Congress are less favorably portrayed, less likely to be associated with a diverse agenda, and portrayed as more marginal than Caucasian members, factors other than race being equal (p. 90). By implication, the argument extends to all minority political activists and public officials. It also implies that constituencies represented by African-American politicians are greatly disadvantaged in the political process.

Common pool (or property) resource studies attempt to address the puzzle of managing natural resources highlighted by Garrett Hardin's (1968) Tragedy of the Commons dilemma. In that scenario of an unmanaged commons, a resource (e.g., pasture) made available to a multiplicity of users will result in a free-for-all leading to the destruction of that natural resource. Traditionally, solutions to this resource overuse problem have come in the form of privatization or state control of natural resources.

The Polish philosopher and diplomat Piotr Ogrodzinski has described “civil society” as a weasel word. It is hard to disagree, given that neo-Tocquevillians, Weberians, critical theorists, Christian fundamentalists, and World Bank analysts all unabashedly sing its praises while having completely different referents in mind for the term. Because it concerns itself with the historical development of civil society, rather than with some abstract idealized notion of it, this collection of essays by historians and social scientists is a sorely needed addition to the literature.

This book provides a solid contribution to our understanding of regime transitions, although from an unusual perspective: that of the armed forces of an outgoing dictatorship. Since its inception, the literature on democratization has argued that modes of regime transition (and the actors empowered during this process) have a substantial impact on the success and quality of a new democracy. Craig Arceneaux's central insight is that who retains control of the process in a transition from a military dictatorship depends to a great degree on the cohesion of the armed forces and the coherence of their economic and political strategy. To establish this proposition, Arceneaux adopts an institutionalist approach to examine five cases of transition in South America, all drawn from the period of prolonged military rule that characterized the region during the 1960s and 1970s.

The field of urban politics has been in the theoretical doldrums for some 20 years now. This is not to say there has been a dearth of scholarship; on the contrary, empirical case studies taking political economy, policy, or institutional approaches have been common. But unlike the heyday of the study of the field through the 1970s, there has been no compelling debate that has held the attention of students of American politics and political scientists more generally. Alan DiGaetano and John Klemanski set themselves up for no small task, then, by seeking not simply to establish comparisons between cities in the United States and Great Britain, but to build a new theoretical foundation for the study of city politics and for urban political economy more generally. On the whole, while the authors provide a sweeping vista of the state of the field, the theoretical edifice they build is not solid enough to sustain the weight of their own hypotheses and claims.

In recent years more attention has begun to be paid to the different forms of women's engagement with the conventional political arena in Latin America. This interest partly reflects the impact of transitions to democracy and the demobilization of social movements. But it also reflects a change of approach by many of the scholars examining women's political activities as they have reassessed the importance of institutions and the salience of “politics.”

Nearly 15 years has elapsed since the World Commission on Environment and Development—the so-called Brundtland Commission—popularized the idea of “sustainable development.” The phrase turned out to be unusually slippery, providing both political cover and ammunition for almost anyone engaged in debates about the global environment and/or development. Indeed, scholars and policymakers of all theoretical or ideological stripes found creative ways to employ the phrase “sustainable development” to support a wide array of arguments in these discussions.

This is surely the most ambitious and the most accomplished study of affluent post-World War II democratic welfare states. It uses statistical, case study, and comparative historical methods to describe and explain the course of social welfare policy over the second half of the twentieth century in 16 nations. Quantitatively, the study examines social insurance and service programs, major public expenditure and revenue aggregates, and an array of fine-grained indicators of state redistributive and safety net outcomes, from 1960 through 1994. Somewhat more qualitatively, the study extends its reach to encompass job and gender, labor market, and educational policies over the whole 1945–1996 period. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods of explanatory analysis, the work assesses various accounts of welfare state development and crisis, in particular, its authors' institutionally amplified, class-analytical political resource theory.

This is a learned and intriguing book covering the span of modern history of East Central Europe as well as the Balkans. The scope of the book is broad, including various theoretical approaches, historical analysis, and a rich discussion of economics. There is a particularly interesting description of technological innovations' impact on the region's economic and political structure. Unlike some earlier books on the region, which tended to treat Eastern Europe as a region outside the international context, Andrew Janos's work does an excellent job of both relating the impact of events in the “center” of the international system on the region and providing an outstanding comparison to Latin America, the other quasi-“peripheral” region of the international system during the last 300 years.

In 1999, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, was awarded a large grant to fund a survey-based study of the 2000 presidential election. In anticipation of that study, and to help in its design, a colloquium was held in the Fall of 1999, titled “What's a Good Election Study, and What Are Election Studies Good for?” The chapters contained in Election Studies: What's Their Use? are the product of that colloquium.