The Political Economy of Poland's Transition: New Firms and Reform Governments. By John E. Jackson, Jacek Klich, and Krystyna Poznanska. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 296p. $80.00.

How does a country overcome the challenges of the “dual transition,” or the movement from a planned to a market-based economy, while also building a democratic political structure? That is the central question addressed by this book. The authors challenge the earlier scholarship that doubted the likely success of simultaneous marketization and democratization. Since economic reforms impose high costs on existing politically powerful sectors (such as state-owned firms and agriculture), the argument went, groups associated with these sectors will oppose reforms, making transition difficult. Ironically, the more open the political system, the more it is open to the demands of sectors that lose out because of economic reform, thus threatening democracy.

The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq. Edited by Brendan O'Leary, John McGarry and Khaled Salih. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 384p. $45.00 cloth, $26.50 paper.

This edited volume on the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq is a genuinely honest effort at tackling the difficult issues currently confronting Kurdistan. From the outset, the editors (two of whom worked for the advisory board set up by the Kurdistan Regional Government) acknowledge that this work “is not neutral. It takes the existence of Kurdistan as a political entity as a desirable given”(i), and most of the authors adopt a sympathetic approach to Kurdistan and the Kurds of Iraq.

Japan's Dual Civil Society: Members Without Advocates. By Robert Pekkanen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 280p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

How does a state regulate or promote civil society? Does a non-Western, industrialized state play a different role in this regard than that of advanced industrialized states in the West? How does an unconventional form of civil society affect polity? Robert Pekkanen's book touches on these and other questions of great interest to the field of comparative politics.

The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. By Monica Prasad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 280p. $57.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

This is an ambitious book, and an important one. It asks one of the key questions of contemporary political economy: how to explain the rise of neoliberal economic policies in advanced industrialized countries. It answers this question by considering the rise of neoliberal policies in four countries—Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—in three policy areas—taxation, welfare, and industrial policy. Although the book's main focus is on important moments of policy change in the 1970s and 1980s, it considers these in the light of the preceding postwar period and uses them to illuminate more recent events. It notes that although in retrospect it may seem natural that the United States and the UK would have become neoliberal and France and Germany not, this was not at all obvious at the time. Much the contrary, since both the United States and the UK in the 1970s had more progressive tax policies, more egalitarian welfare states, and more anti-business industrial policies than France or Germany. The puzzle, then, is how to explain the transformations in all four countries, which left the United States and the UK much more neoliberal in tax policies, less egalitarian in welfare states, and arguably more pro-business.

Social Traps and the Problem of Trust. By Bo Rothstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 256p. $80.00 cloth, $30.99 paper.

How do you get from Moscow to Stockholm? That is, how do you create efficient, honest government like that of Sweden as opposed to the incompetence and corruption found in Russia? This question drives Bo Rothstein into an analysis of the causes of social traps—situations where actors cannot cooperate due to mutual distrust, even if cooperation is mutually beneficial. Eliminating social traps requires generalized trust, that is, social capital. How does one engender trust? Robert Putnam, both in Making Democracy Work (1993) and Bowling Alone (2001), argues that social capital is created through civil society, a process that bubbles up through history and culture. Rothstein takes this view to task for not analytically distinguishing between associations (a behavior) and trust (a belief), for it is really the belief that needs to be generated. Trust, in his view, need not evolve organically from below; it can be generated from above by establishing efficient political institutions. If public officials are corrupt, citizens will infer that people in general are dishonest and behave dishonestly themselves. Thus, social traps are sprung. The reverse is also true: Honest governance begets social trust.