Merillee Grindle addresses three questions: Why would rational politicians choose to give up power? What accounts for the selection of some institutions rather than others? What are the political consequences of the creation of new institutions? She studies cases of decentralizing political reforms in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. Her case studies are loosely guided by eleven hypotheses deduced from three schools of thought. The schools to which she refers in an introductory and concluding chapter are rational choice, comparative institutionalism, and new institutionalism (the latter has two subvariants: transaction costs and institutional design). The theoretical perspectives are apparently not equally useful across questions, as new institutionalism is not used to deduce hypotheses on why politicians would choose to reform, and rational choice is not applied to the reasons some some institutional changes are chosen over others.

The themes of crisis and transformation have fueled a miniexplosion of research on media and democracy in the last decade. Researchers within or close to the “media studies'' school have developed a burgeoning literature on questions of citizenship and the public sphere, in the context of deregulation, expanding media markets, and rising interest in the arguments of the deliberative democrats. Scholars more closely connected to political science have pursued an overlapping but different agenda. From the United States and western Europe, amid concern at signs of a crisis of citizen engagement, the focus increasingly is on media power to mobilize or demobilize voters. From Eastern and central Europe and Latin America there is an emerging corpus on the role of media in the transition and consolidation of democracy. Cross-cutting these various strands are the Internet revolution and the question of globalization and, more specifically, U.S. potency to lead or at least predict trends in political communication for the democratic world.

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 book is about the motivations of political actors. Many of the most commonly used models of party competition and government formation are grounded in explicit assumptions about the motivations of party strategists. These tend to assume one of three basic and interrelated motivations—the desire to fulfill policy objectives, the desire to control the perquisites of office, and the desire to maximize votes. While recognizing that living and breathing people may be driven by any or all of these motivations, among others, and that these may interact with each other in complex ways, most theorists ground their models in assumptions of policy-seeking OR office-seeking OR vote-maximizing by key political decision makers. Indeed this distinction between motivational assumptions is one of the most common ways to classify models of party competition. In part the grounding of models in a single motivational assumption is for the sake of analytical tractability; in part it is because the heuristic insights made possible by these approaches are enhanced if the models are kept simple and their relationship to core assumptions is kept straightforward.

Writing at a time when the literature on transitions to democracy was fixated on the mode of transition, and when concepts such as authoritarian legacy, authoritarian enclave, or the shadow of the past dominated, Wendy Hunter's 1997 book, Eroding Military Influence in Brazil, went against the grain. In a direct attack on institutionalist approaches that emphasized the resiliency of military prerogatives in transitions from military regimes, Hunter argues that democracy itself would, over time, reduce the influence exerted by the armed forces. A solid theoretical orientation, rich casework, and insightful commentary on the dynamics behind the creation of civilian control all mark the book as a noteworthy contribution to the literature on democratic transitions, civil–military relations, and Latin American politics.

A thoughtful book on a subject that can be quite vexing, Shades of Citizenship benefits greatly from the comparative analytical framework employed. The central poles of comparative attention are the U.S. and Brazilian censuses, but Nobles also comments on a range of other national processes of census-taking and systems of racial classification employed; Germany and South Africa as well as other Latin American, African, and European countries are mentioned.

Scholars of media and public opinion in Western Europe and the United States will find plenty of useful information and much to argue about in A Virtuous Circle. The data are rich and broad, and the conclusions drawn are provocative and relevant to some of the major debates in the field. The central question addressed is whether the news media discourages political engagement.

Leigh Payne greatly enriches our knowledge of Latin American transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. The Armed Right Wing focuses on the role of violent right-wing groups and government responses to them in three Latin American countries, with application elsewhere. Explaining that uncivil social movements “use political violence … to promote exclusionary objectives … as a deliberate strategy to eliminate, intimidate, and silence political adversaries” (p. 1), Payne contrasts these movements with “civil” social movements. They employ rule-breaking (and violence) to “expand [rather than curtail] citizen rights and freedoms” (p. 1).

A specter is haunting the Trilateral Democracies—this specter is called civic malaise. It has visited these countries before; rearing its head for the first time a quarter-century ago, proclaiming the demise of democracy due to the inability of governments to respond to the onslaught of waves of new forms of participatory democracy and political action. (Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, 1975). Too much democracy, as it were, may be too much of a good thing. Fortunately many of these dire predictions have not materialized, perhaps partly because they were highlighted a quarter-century ago. The sequel, Disaffected Democracies, celebrates the silver anniversary of the original Crisis of Democracy. This successor volume is similarly concerned with the fate of democracy in rich countries. These democracies are “troubled” (p. 7), so the argument goes, because their public institutions are undermined by declining confidence in government and sagging interpersonal social trust. The authors of this edited volume situate the sources of these “disturbing” (p.13) developments squarely in the political sphere. In other words, the origins of the decline in confidence in political institutions is not explained by a frail social fabric but, rather, by failures of government and politics themselves. Despite a tight focus on the temporal (the last 25 years) and spatial (the Trilateral countries) parameters of this edited volume, it is refreshing to see so many diverse and innovative diagnoses as to what is ailing the rich democracies.

What is public opinion? In this aptly named book, authors Jacob Shamir and Michal Shamir attempt to address their perceived deficiencies in public opinion research by posing a new theoretical framework for the study of this important subject. Though hundreds of books, articles, and monographs have addressed public opinion, the authors contend that current theories of public opinion are too deterministic and that they fall short of explaining the full range of public opinion possibilities. Existing studies attempt to interpret public opinion on the basis of the observed outcomes—i.e., Why was a particular opinion expressed? What does it mean in the context of the instrument constructed to measure that opinion? The authors believe that to understand public opinion, one must come to understand the role of the information environment in which that opinion is located. In other words, Shamir and Shamir are not interested simply in the static outcomes of public opinion but in the environment in which that opinion is constructed. To this end, they propose a new theoretical construct by which to interpret it.

This is a helpful addition to the growing body of historical institutionalist literature that demonstrates the influence of macro- and sectoral-level institutions on policymaking. The central arguments, examined here with regard to agricultural policy, are two. First, institutional relationships among state and nonstate actors may facilitate one policy objective but impede other policy goals. Neither novel nor inconsistent with the literature, this proposition is advanced through elaboration of how various interrelationships between political parties and interest groups shape governments' policy capabilities. Second, Sheingate argues that the American institutional framework of dispersed authority and pluralism does not necessarily render governments incapable or subject to interest group capture. In advancing this proposition, he seeks to put paid to popular depictions of American agrarian politics as constituting iron triangles and all-powerful farm groups.

Politics of Institutional Choice is an important contribution to the literature on legislative institutions. The authors' backgrounds complement each other to good effect. The result is a study that is both conversant with the literature on legislative politics in the United States and Western Europe and solidly grounded in the politics of contemporary Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of reformed legislative institutions by the Russian Republic in 1993 left the newly elected representatives with the need to devise a working set of parliamentary institutions for the newly formed bicameral legislature. The “building materials” out of which these were fashioned—legislative committees, party caucuses, rules allocating agenda control to leaders—resemble those of the U.S. Congress and Western European parliaments, but the institutional structure was adapted to the needs of Russian politics.

W. Rand Smith compares socialist policies of industrial retrenchment in France and Spain during the 1980s and 1990s. Both governments sought to adapt their national economy to change in the global market, through investment incentives and labor policies, in a way that would avoid sectoral crisis or even collapse. They sought to achieve an “orderly exit” of labor from redundancy-plagued industrial sectors, notably steel and automobiles, through job retraining, help in establishing small businesses, relocation incentives, and improvements in the job market, not to mention such standard support mechanisms as severance payments and preretirement systems that supported the incomes of unemployed workers. There was a distinct convergence between French and Spanish policy around this kind of adaptive policy. Neither country after 1983 resisted global market trends through price controls or subsidies or trade protection, and neither government embraced market adjustment through more liberal policies of deregulation of capital or labor markets.

William Walters probes understandings of the concepts of unemployment that developed and, to an extent, succeeded one another over a hundred years in British history. The British case has its own unique trajectory but parallels developments elsewhere, so the book's interest is not confined to specialists in British politics or social history. Walters applies a Foucauld-inspired governmentality perspective to unemployment in order both to overcome the routine and familiar understandings that have become attached to the concept and, more broadly, to contribute to what he terms a genealogy of the social. The latter refers to a particular sphere of governance as exemplified by the practices, techniques, and institutions devised to govern processes and problem populations, in this case the unemployed. Genealogical approaches are suspicious of generalization and systematization and hold that “we can learn from the particular and the contextual” (p. 8). Thus, Walters argues, the government of unemployment will be instructive for understanding social governance generally.

While this book does not quite cover the broad range promised by its title, it does offer a sophisticated analysis of the privatization of rural industry in China, thick in social science theory and rich with empirical data.

In studying and analyzing the postcommunist “transition” countries, it is becoming ever more apparent that what calls for explanation is not only change, as expressed in the trajectory of liberal capitalist reforms, but also continuity. Even in the face of profound institutional transformation, mentalities and behaviors associated with the past are not readily giving way to new modalities of thought and action. Accordingly, one way of approaching the problem of explaining the variability of regime outcomes in the former Soviet bloc is to focus on the particular institutional and discursive forms that the interplay of change and continuity has produced in each country. In his work on Poland, Harald Wydra encourages us to analyze this interplay from a particular point of view—one that is rooted in the lived experiences of the populations involved, as opposed to how countries measure up with respect to progress toward liberal capitalist outcomes. Consequently, he argues that even as discontinuity and change have characterized the “first reality” of post-1989 institution-building, important continuities mark the “second reality of images, myths and mentalities” (p. 26). In turn, this “second reality” provides “fundamental reference points in post-1989 Poland and Eastern Europe” (p. 25) that infuse the new institutional realities with unique, culturally determined, content and meaning.

German unification presents conceptual puzzles of which comparativists dream. Has this monumental change, which boils down to full German sovereignty, growth of German power, and the emergence of new domestic political interests, altered Germany's relationship to Europe? Is Germany withdrawing from or dominating European institutions? Does the new Germany still tread its well-worn postwar path of the model “European”? The questions are important for our understanding of the sources of policy change and continuity as well as the process of regional integration in general and the course of European integration in particular. In which issue areas has Germany's postunification policy broken with the past? Is the break caused by changes in domestic politics or the increase in the power of a unified and fully sovereign Germany? Have policy changes impeded or enhanced the speed and character of European unification? Are important continuities evident? If both policy continuity and change are present, why the variation? These are the questions Jeffrey Anderson tackles in this timely and important volume.

This excellent book is a worthwhile acquisition for anyone and any library, but it is an essential one for those concerned with international law, international organization, and war crimes. Bass combines the best of his scholarly political science training with his experience as a former correspondent with The Economist.

This book takes the reader through the complexities of the search for peace in the first chapters and through the provision of the UNTAC operation up to 1993. It concludes with an overview of the 1998 elections, and in between there is a section dedicated to the period between the two polls. The first section is reasonable, but the text is repetitive and it repeats what several others have already written (Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC, 1995, and various works by David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Michael Vickery). The analysis reflects that by several of the recognized Khmer scholars, and is useful to read, but while the analysis is insightful regarding Western peacemaking processes and the Khmer resistance at various points, it does not question assumptions regarding the overwriting of Western peace paradigms onto Khmer political culture. This has a distinctly different historical evolution and an equally dissimilar set of contemporary values regarding the notions of opposition, power sharing, and social harmony. The limits of this type of analysis are present throughout the work and are probably best illustrated by the statement that the violence of July 1997 “transformed UNTAC's enterprise from what may have been termed a [limited success' to a failed rescue of a failed state” (p. 265).

Edited collections usually have relatively clear provenance. Most often they are brought to life by colleagues who are intrigued by an issue or a question; they then organize a conference (or a collection) around that theme and seek a publisher for the resulting collection. Such works are commonly marked by the putative expectations associated with an edited book: There is an attempt by the editors to present the unifying theme desired (if not demanded) by most university presses and the academic reviewers whose reports determine which way the thumbs go. Usually the editors attempt to herd the cats they have invited to participate—and ask that the contributors address unifying themes or take desired approaches. Even if the cats do no more than tip a ritual bow in the direction of the unifying theme, the editors normally use the introduction and conclusion to craft at least the appearance of unification.