Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition. By Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 218p. $55.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Multibillion dollar infrastructural projects, or megaprojects such as the Channel Tunnel, the Øresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden, the Hong Kong and Denver airports, or many high-speed rail links in Europe, continue to be built in record numbers despite poor performance and colossal losses. Why? The authors provide ample evidence to substantiate their claim that such projects are systematically misrepresented in public and private deliberations because many of the participants in the process have incentives to underestimate costs, overestimate revenues, undervalue environmental impact, and overvalue economic development effects.

Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s.

Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation. By Dmitry P. Gorenburg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 312p. $75.00.

Dmitry Gorenburg has written a most useful book on the subject of minority ethnic mobilization within the Russian Federation during the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin periods. Gorenburg sets out clearly the aims underlying his ambitious study. The book, he writes, “seeks to explain how state institutions affect ethnic mobilization,” through a focusing on the upsurge of nationalist sentiment that took place in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s (p. xi). In addition, the book also intends to challenge the widely held perception that “governing elites can kindle latent ethnic grievances virtually at will” and “to shift the study of ethnic mobilization from the whys of its emergence to the hows of its development as a political force” (p. xi). (It is unclear, at least to this reviewer, why the “whys” are not equally as important as the “hows”: Both questions, one would think, need to be carefully addressed by specialists.) In answering the “how” question, Gorenburg argues that “The nature of these processes … is determined by the ethnic and political institutions established by the state” (p. xii).

Democracy and Redistribution.

The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876–1929. By Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 408p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer provide a detailed, theoretically rich examination of the interplay between political chaos and economic growth in Mexico. Why did Mexico's economy continue to grow through a series of civil wars, coups, and outside interventions? More generally, what conditions lead to robust growth under political instability? Political scientists, economists, and others have searched for, and failed to find, a consistent link between political instability and economic failure. These authors develop an argument on the conditions under which instability and robust economic growth go hand in hand, using the years before, during, and after Mexico's chaotic revolution as their case study.

Democracy in Latin America 1760–1900: Volume 1, Civic Selfhood and Public Life in Mexico and Peru. By Carlos A. Forment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. 488p. $35.00.

Carlos Forment has produced a highly original, intriguing, and thoroughly researched exploration of civic behavior in Latin America from the mid-1700s through 1900. He presents the provocative argument, contrary to much past research, that citizen democracy, “understood in Tocquevillian terms as a daily practice and form of life rooted in social equality, mutual recognition, and political liberty, was by the mid-nineteenth century rooted in the region” (p. xi). This book cites numerous examples and scholarship from many parts of Latin America, but Forment provides detailed evidence from Mexico and Peru. As he argues in his introduction, Latin American forms of democracy are characterized by four qualities. First, democracy is disjointed because those forms that do exist are found among individual citizens, and not between citizens and governmental institutions, which essentially imposed an authoritarian structure on society. Second, he believes that the practice of democracy is one-sided, given his evidence that it is practiced in civil society rather than in political or public life. Third, it is highly fragmented, given the failures in Latin America to meld social equality and cultural/ethnic differences. Fourth, he claims that Catholicism provided the language of public life, and that Latin Americans used it to create new democratic meanings from traditional religious terms, which he labels “Civic Catholicism.”

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India.

Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. By Ran Hirschl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 294p. $49.95.

To the various systems of government known to political science we may now add another—“juristocracy.” Although not rigorously defined in this book, the term refers to a process of judicial empowerment in which judiciaries take on powers and responsibilities previously exercised by representative institutions. While there is little new in recognizing that courts often make decisions with profound political consequences, this study considers recent transfers of power to judiciaries to be unprecedented in their breadth and scope, features of what the author describes as “the new constitutionalism.”

Incomplete Democracy: Political Democratization in Chile and Latin America. By Manuel Antonio Garreton. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 224p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Consortium in Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University deserves gratitude for launching this series on “Latin America in Translation.” This translation clearly presents the complex analyses of a profound thinker, one who excels at elucidating the subtleties, contradictions, and paradoxes of today's democracies. Previously one of the pioneers of studying transitions from authoritarian rule, Garreton now focuses on the constraints on the successor regimes. His trenchant observations will interest political theorists as well as comparativists and Latin Americanists. He devotes the first half of the book to a broad treatment of current Latin American politics and the second half to a study of the crucial case of Chile. This powerful combination of the general and the particular renders this publication valuable for graduate courses, although it is too sophisticated for most undergraduates.

Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe. Edited by Katherine Hite and Paola Cesarini. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 360p. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the role of antecedent authoritarian regimes to understand the many new democracies that have emerged around the world. This volume seeks to contribute to this discussion by introducing the concept of “authoritarian legacies” as a new analytic lens. The goal of the volume is specifically to show how a focus on authoritarian legacies offers fresh insights into the workings of contemporary democracies in Southern Europe and Latin America.

Creating Cooperation: How States Develop Human Capital in Europe.

Political Economy of Energy in the Southern Cone. By Anil Hira. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 128p. $59.95.

What role does the state play in the age of neoliberal economics? How autonomous is the government from both domestic and international forces in the privatization, regulation, and integration of the electricity sector? Anil Hira addresses these important questions in his detailed analysis of the evolution of energy policy in the Southern Cone. The book is divided into five chapters that include an introduction, a chapter outlining the author's theoretical framework, one analyzing the domestic efforts to liberalize energy markets, one addressing regional integration, and a concluding chapter with suggestions for improving regulations in the energy sector. He concludes that the state continues to play an important role in shaping energy policy throughout the region, and the role of the state, either through state-owned enterprises or through regulation of the energy market, continues to exert an enormous influence over pricing, reliability, and investment. Furthermore, Hira argues that regional integration, which requires interstate cooperation, is essential in order to enhance the ability of Southern Cone economies to compete in the global marketplace.

The Left Transformed in Post-Communist Societies: The Cases of East-Central Europe, Russia and Ukraine.

Fujimori's Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America. By Charles D. Kenney. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 379p. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

In this book on Peruvian politics, Charles Kenney leaves few stones unturned in analyzing the various factors that led to the suspension of the country's constitution and the disbanding of the legislature by President Alberto Fujimori in April 1992. While I am not entirely convinced that this particular episode in Peruvian politics warrants the book-length treatment that it has received here, Kenney has done a commendable job of locating Peru's “autogolpe” (or civilian-inflicted coup) within the broader literature on the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America.

Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family Under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. By Mala Htun. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 232p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

Under military rule from the 1960s to the 1980s and increasingly since the transitions to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, second-wave feminists have mobilized for gender equality and to effect legal reforms in Latin America. Despite this activism and despite the steady stream of high-quality publications on gender and politics in Latin America, there has been very little comparative research on gender-related public policy reform in Latin America. Mala Htun's book on gender and public policymaking under democracy and dictatorship is an important scholarly contribution, filling many of the gaps in the literature on public policy and feminist activism in Latin America.