Enforcing Equality: Congress, the Constitution and the Protection of Individual Rights. By Rebecca E. Zeitlow. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 265p. $45.00.

The unit of analysis for law professors is nearly always the court decision. This holds true for legal pedagogy and scholarship in general, but it is particularly true in the area of constitutional rights. On the basis of the assumption that courts are independent of the political process and can exercise judicial review to protect “discrete and insular” minorities from the tyranny of the majority, it is assumed by many—especially those in the legal academy—that the judiciary is the best-situated governmental institution to protect individual rights under the U.S. Constitution. In Enforcing Equality, Rebecca Zeitlow joins a growing legion of law professors and political scientists interested in the “Constitution outside the Court,” and who are dubious of the so-called countermajoritarian problem, and the Court's unabated role in protecting constitutional rights.

The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century. By Sheri Berman. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. 238p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Sheri Berman has written an engaging book about the origins, development, and deployment of social democracy in Europe since the late nineteenth century. The central argument is that social democracy, as one of several movements that challenged liberalism and orthodox Marxism, ultimately prevailed over competitors. In Berman's view, the triumphant social democratic reconciliation of capitalism and democracy in post–World War II Europe cannot be understood as simply a muscular form of embedded liberalism; social democracy is a distinct ideology that undergirds a system of political control of capitalism and communitarian policies and institutions.

The Politics of Labor Reform in Latin America: Between Flexibility and Rights. By Maria Lorena Cook. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. 231p. $45.00.

This is a very ambitious work, meticulously researched and studiously written, often presenting a dazzling display of intricate information. It is quite unusual for a single author to show such mastery over various country contexts. The book could easily have been written by several authors as it carefully covers and interprets labor laws in six Latin American countries, focusing mainly on the period in which flexibilized labor policies were implemented. Maria Lorena Cook couples countries that share historical and institutional similarities, namely: Argentina and Brazil are chosen as having legacies of state corporate systems; Chile and Peru represent postradical regimes; and Mexico and Bolivia experienced revolutionary pasts. Introductory overviews on labor reform in Latin America and concluding comments on where these countries stand today between flexibility and rights act as bookends for the paired country chapters. This is a skillful exegesis of pertinent documents, voluminous secondary literature, and expert testimony concerning two decades of labor laws after the restitution of democracy in the postauthoritarian period in these countries—unfinished as that process continued to be in Peru and Bolivia (at the time of the book's completion in 2005).

Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin America. By Alberto Díaz-Cayeros. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 302p. $80.00.

Comparative federalism is a vibrant area of research, at the crossroads of various methodological and disciplinary approaches, and it has contributed to and enriched broader strands of scholarship in comparative politics and institutional analysis. Alberto Díaz-Cayeros has been one of the leading new voices in this area. Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin America is a useful signpost in this agenda. The book explores the politics of fiscal authority, focusing on the centralization of taxation in Latin America during the twentieth century. It develops a theoretical framework and applies it to an analytic narrative of the path of Mexico. It also provides a comparison with the other Latin American federations, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. The book effectively blends quantitative and qualitative empirical exploration with formal modeling, touching important chords of broader debates in political science, including issues of state building, institutional origin and institutional change, the structure of interest representation, and political agency.

Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China. By Mary Elizabeth Gallagher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 256p. $47.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

One of the most pressing issues to be addressed with regard to the politics of the People's Republic of China is authoritarian resilience in the face of substantial market reform. Structural Marxism, modernization theory, and transition theory all lead us to expect that strong economic growth (markets and, to a significant extent, privatization), the emergence of a middle class, and the presence of fragmentation within the Chinese leadership might very well unleash forces of democratization. Of course, twentieth-century capitalism does not replicate the Anglo/American experience in which the bourgeoisie is seen to have ushered in democratic institutions, and so some scholars would argue that there is no conundrum to be explained. Nevertheless, the expectation that China's economic transformation will encourage pro-democratic forces persists among those who do and do not know China well.