Scholarship is substantial and growing on "transitional jus- tice," that is, the legal and political decisions devised by incoming democratizing regimes to address the excesses of outgoing repressive regimes and the harms endured by their victims. Truth commissions are perhaps the most significant, if controversial, innovations in a democratizing regime's toolbox. Their significance is largely derived from their peculiarity. Since the early 1970s, approximately 21 commis- sions have been established in various countries. They have been defined as "bodies set up to investigate a past history of violations of human rights in a particular country-which can include violations by the military or other government forces or by armed opposition forces" (Priscilla Hayner, "Fifteen Truth Commissions-1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study," Human Rights Quarterly 16 [November 1994]: 597-655).

Modern welfare states offer cash payments, public housing, medical assistance, food subsidies, and a wide range of social services to needy individuals. The assistance is rendered by professional social workers and administrators who have the authority (and responsibility) to determine who is needy, what their needs are, and how those needs can be met equitably and efficiently. This top-down approach is both ineffective and paternalistic, according to Julie Anne White, who advocates a system of care based on democratic delib- eration rather than bureaucratic rationality.

By now most readers have a good deal of familiarity with the Christian Right, the political movement of conservative Protestants that began in the late 1970s and continues to thrive today. The movement has undergone significant changes over the past two decades. Interest groups have risen and fallen, and presidential candidacies (namely, that of Pat Robertson in 1988) have failed. Yet, the Christian Right is still seen by scholars, pundits, and electioneers alike as a political force with which to be reckoned.

Marie Henehan presents a systematic study of every roll call vote on foreign policy taken by the Senate between 1897 and 1984. She predicts an increase in Senate activity and disagree- ment on foreign policy after "the emergence of imperialism as a critical issue in 1897, the crisis over involvement in Europe in 1917, the heightened importance of the response to commu- nism in 1947, and the perceived failure of the containment policy in Vietnam between the Tet Offensive in 1968 and the bombing of Cambodia in 1970" (p. 83). She also predicts a gradual decline in activity as the issue is resolved, but increases following major policy failures related to each critical issue.

Not long ago, Richard Fenno was at an American Political Science Association convention, wondering aloud whether anyone might want to publish a case study of a single congressional district over almost three decades. The Uni- versity of North Carolina Press did, and congressional schol- ars and students of representation are indebted to the editors there. Just when we suspected that Fenno could not wring one more set of insights from his "soaking and poking" political anthropology, he produces a book that tells a profound tale of political change in the South (and in suburbia), gives us a grounded study of what it means to represent a constituency, and offers an understanding of both the Rayburn and Gingrich eras in the House of Representa- tives. In addition, students of Congress can enjoy this book in its nuanced referencing of Home Style, Fenno's still-relevant study of House members in their constituencies, published in 1978.

The multiracial extravaganza staged at the 2000 Republican convention reminds us of the centrality of race in our national politics. In a work that effectively challenges cher- ished notions of how the political system functions, Paul Frymer argues that through most of U.S. history the major parties have lacked incentives to promote the interests of African Americans.

After a promising start by Martin Landau more than 30 years ago, and advances by a small coterie of mostly Berkeley and Stanford political scientists and organization theorists, the study of organizational reliability has largely been orphaned by American political science. One reason such an important area of research has been given short shrift is that many political scientists do not think of reliability as a subject based in politics. It has been deemed more worthy of the attention of other disciplines, especially engineering and operations research. Another reason is that we have become even more obsessed with transactional efficiencies than was the case when Landau issued his warnings in 1969. Larry Heimann presents a nuanced study on the problem of reliability that incorporates politics, organization, and technology and offers a series of convincing arguments about some reliability paradoxes in policymaking. His book centers on the connec- tion between bureaucratic structure, reliable decision mak- ing, and the incentives public agencies have for responding to risk in one way or another.

Many political scientists like institutions, in particular exog- enous institutions, which guide and constrain actions and allow scholars to concentrate more narrowly on behaviors within well-defined settings. For the interest groups subfield, institutions tend to be more mercurial than those in other areas of American politics. For instance, fundamental aspects of Congress may be institutionalized, but groups and lobby- ists come and go. The environment of interests is ever changing. Characterizing the interactions between legislators and lobbyists is made more difficult because of the lack of clear institutional structures that guide or constrain behav- iors. The iron triangle concept was powerful and meaningful because it provided at the least a loose framework for the analysis of legislator-lobbyist interactions. Kevin Hula's new book follows the reasoning of Hugh Heclo and William Browne, who argue that the iron triangle concept is outdated and inappropriate. That convenient metaphor suggested an informal institutional structure that is simply no longer appropriate. Without the iron triangle, what can fill the void?

Desmond King offers a richly researched, skillfully written account of the development of a race-based U.S. immigration policy during the 1920s. The shift to a "national origins" immigration policy is linked to domestic racial and ethnic politics and especially to racial segregation. Moreover, King contends that a grasp of the immigration debates and policies of the 1920s is instrumental to understanding contemporary racial and ethnic politics, including the controversies sur- rounding multiculturalism.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century there was an explosion in the use of institutional corrections unparalleled in the annals of American penology. The numbers tell the story well: Just before the new millennium almost 1.3 million adults were confined in state and federal correctional facili- ties, which represents a tripling of the population in just under 20 years. One consequence of such a policy, and there are many, is that eventually a large proportion of these inmates will be released back into society. Their prospects do not look promising in terms of our current knowledge about recidivism rates, and we can expect a large and, most likely, increasing number of these individuals to rejoin the ranks of the incarcerated. The reasons for this policy failure are undoubtedly traceable to a number of forces, although one probably need not look beyond the prison walls as a place to start searching for answers.

In an age when commercials bombard us with plain folk (from central casting) ruminating about the latest proposal in Congress and when "astroturf" more often refers to syn- thetically manufactured grassroots activity than to stadium playing fields, evidence that groups frequently "go public" is easy to come by. Nevertheless, these efforts to reach and use the public have received little systematic attention from political scientists. Ken Kollman aims to fill this substantial gap in interest group scholarship. Outside Lobbying is an impressive effort, one that should invigorate further inquiry into this important aspect of interest group advocacy.

This work is touted as the only book-length examination of the sociological model of vote choice in American politics since David Knoke's The Social Bases of Political Parties (1976), and it is, indeed, a well-researched examination of the role that race, class, religion, and gender play in our under- standing of voter alignments in the United States. At the same time, I have concerns about some of the methodological decisions made by the authors and the effect of these choices on their conclusions.

America's Congress is a deceptively simple work. At its most basic, it is an exploration of the public moves of members of Congress over the course of American history. With a newly built database of 2,304 observations of members' publicly noted moves stretching back to 1789, Mayhew offers an innovative portrait of how and when American legislators have made their mark on the public record, as recorded by eminent historians of the middle to late twentieth century. What makes this a deceptively simple work? Mayhew's aim and effect in writing America's Congress go far beyond his perceptive reading of the fascinating patterns uncovered. Instead, the book is really a call for a new way of studying Congress and legislative politics more generally. It is a commentary, Mayhew says, on political scientists' treatment of Congress, and it is an appeal to legislative scholars to rethink the dominant modes and methods by which they typically approach the task of explaining legislative behavior and outcomes. To understand how America's Congress makes this contribution, a more detailed exploration of Mayhew's mode and methods of inquiry is in order.

Dividing Citizens is an important contribution both to the burgeoning literature on the historical development of the American state and citizenship and to the lively field of work on gender within that corpus. Like the best studies of this sort, Mettler's book ably demonstrates not only how the transforming institutions and practices affected women but also how gender norms and practices were built into the new structures, making gender a basic element of their architec- ture.

Policy entrepreneurs or issue advocates figure prominently in major theories of the policy process (e.g., Frank R. Baum- gartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, 1993; John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alterna- tives, and Public Policies, 1995; Paul A. Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith, Policy Change and Learning: An Advocacy Coalition Approach, 1993). This book explores in depth the phenomenon of policy entrepreneurs, the individuals who invest their time and resources in trying to bring an idea to fruition. The controversial issue of school choice is a partic- ularly apt example of a policy that has spread through the efforts of entrepreneurs laboring in a number of states. A good overview sets the scene in the first chapter and describes such variants as public school choice (within and across districts), charter schools, private voucher plans, and publicly funded vouchers. But the book emphasizes building and testing a theory of policy entrepreneurship. This carefully crafted study presents a number of significant arguments and findings that will be of interest for scholars (or graduate students) concerned with policy diffusion, policy change, and agenda setting as well as education policy.

This book is the latest product of Georgetown University Press's outstanding American Governance and Public Policy series. Karen Mossberger embarks upon a substantial intel- lectual effort and seeks to accomplish several tasks. First, she provides a detailed account of the evolution of the enterprise zone concept and chronicles its implementation in five states.

Political theory reminds us that punishment is a fundamentally political action, an exercise of political power. This book is about penal reform and the philosophy of punishment as both were debated in postrevolutionary America. Pestritto combs through original writings of the founders and state constitutions in an effort to elucidate leading philosophies about the purpose of the criminal law and punishment. At a macro level, the book provides a window into how the American system, in Pestritto's venues of Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, mediates between the tensions of the preservation of individual liberty and maintenance of public order. The book attempts to bridge the historical gap from our founding to current issues in sentencing, such as the three-strikes rule, determinate or mandatory sentencing laws, and state experimentation in marrying sentences to available prison space, or the cost of incapacitation. Pestritto's greatest contribution is to mine new material in these historical conversations on punishment, which allows them to be heard in our contemporary debates.

Beth Reingold questions some of the conventional wisdom regarding women representing women and their interests. She does this by comparing the legislative behavior of women in the Arizona and California state legislatures in 1990, and she provides an understanding of the consequences and implications of electing women to public office. Reingold is interested in what these trends mean for the political repre- sentation of women in the United States, and it is this concern that focuses the volume.

Ted Lowi once wrote that scandals are a proper subject for the political scientist because the observer is catching the country in the act of being itself (Theodore J. Lowi, "Fore- word," in Andrei S. Markovits and Mark Silverstein, eds., The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies, 1988, p. xii). Lowi's remark seems particularly apt when applied to the study of politics in the United States. At the heart of the American political tradition lies an acute ambiv- alence concerning the nature and uses of political power.

Sandra Suarez sets out to understand why corporations choose certain political strategies rather than others. She argues that firms want to maximize profits and recognize that politics affects their ability to do so, but they cannot easily translate their interests into concrete political strategies.