Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies, Louis Massicotte, André Blais and Antoine Yoshinaka, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 191

Whatever one may think of the 2000 American presidential election, it did have one salutary effect: it drew worldwide attention to the importance of fair and impartially applied election laws. The authors of this work needed no such wake-up call; André Blais and Louis Massicotte enjoy a well-deserved international reputation for expertise in this arcane field. But it is likely that their new book, a compendium and analysis of election laws in 63 countries, will attract wider notice because of recent events in the United States. Unfortunately (though understandably), the extreme decentralization and complexity of American election laws prevented the authors from including the U.S. in their comparative database. Happily, the remaining countries in the sample offer more than enough food for thought. The field of election law has been sadly neglected by political scientists and legal scholars (outside the United States); if interest in the topic continues to grow over the coming years, this book should help to nurture a flourishing academic debate.