As the Soviet regime recedes farther into the past, two types of scholars are now working hard to put the post-Soviet experience in comparative context. Some are those who built their careers on a study of the Soviet Union and have now significantly expanded on their work, while another group comprises scholars of the post-Soviet regime who completed their dissertations after the collapse of the Communist regime. These two books represent some of the best of both of these groups, and both are important in their scope in bringing Russian politics into one of the most important fields in politics, namely, that of elections, parties, and voters.

Benjamin Reilly makes an important contribution to the debate on the appropriate institutional design of electoral systems for mitigating conflict and sustaining democracy in ethnically plural societies. The dominant position in this debate posits the importance of proportional representation (PR) systems. An alternative position, less widely accepted largely because of an ostensible absence of empirical examples, posits the importance of majoritarian preferential systems that encourage cross-ethnic vote pooling. Reilly extends this debate by drawing on heretofore unknown or understudied cases to examine the operation of both majoritarian (the alternative vote or AV and the supplementary vote or SV) and proportional (single-transferable vote or STV) preferential systems in different social contexts and in different elections (legislative and presidential).

Richard Snyder's well-crafted study substantiates what most political scientists suspected all along: that neoliberal reforms lead to new institutions of market governance, rather than to unregulated markets. Snyder sheds light on this understudied topic by examining the reregulation of the coffee sector by four state governments after the Mexican government dismantled the Instituto Mexicano del Café (INMECAFE), the state-owned enterprise that dominated the coffee industry during the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s, when deregulation began, INMECAFE was providing production supports, price controls, and government-managed marketing channels for nearly 200 thousand small coffee producers. Most of these producers were located among the poorest states in southern Mexico.

In The Dynamics of Global Dominance David Abernethy advances four main propositions concerning the rise and demise of European overseas empires over the last half-millennium. The first proposition is that the unprecedented and unparalleled success of European states in building overseas empires in the two long phases of expansion (dated with questionable precision from 1415 to 1773 and from 1824 to 1913) was due primarily to the cumulative, synergistic effects of the extended geographical reach, functional specialization, and ability to work in mutually reinforcing ways of European governmental, business, and religious institutions. In each sphere Europeans faced highly effective non-European competitors. But no such competitor could match the European combination of mutually reinforcing advances in all three spheres. This combination was critical in sustaining not just expansion but also colonial consolidation.

Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa is an insightful, refreshing, and original book that refines and expands our understanding of the so-called “politics of the belly.” A phrase made famous by Jean Francois Bayart (The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 1993), the politics of the belly is the phenomenon of “eating” the fruits of power. The extent to which officeholders monopolize or share these fruits with the larger community has, however, significant consequences for their legitimacy. As Michael Schatzberg suggests, a “moral matrix of legitimate governance” (p. 35) embedded in familial and paternal metaphors shapes these belly politics. In turn, he argues that the moral matrix is rooted in four major premises. The first and second are related to the image of the ruler as a “fatherchief,” who has the obligation, on the one hand, to nurture and nourish his “family,” and on the other hand, to punish his “children” when necessary and pardon them when they truly repent. The third premise concerns the status of women in society; while they are not considered equal to men, rulers should, nonetheless, respect their role as “counselors and advisers.” The fourth premise “holds that permanent power is illegitimate and that political fathers…have to let their children grow up, mature, take on ever-increasing responsibilities in the conduct of their own affairs, and eventually succeed them in power” (p. 192).

The Politics of the Spirit is Timothy Steigenga's long-awaited quantitative study of religious affiliation and political behavior in Central America. What he has done in this spare and conscientious study is to take to task the “conventional wisdom” about Protestantism in Central America. This is a formidable endeavor, given the flood of scholarly literature that has been produced by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists about Protestantism, and especially Pentecostalism, in Latin America over the past two decades. Because Pentecostalism seemed to emerge in Central America during the region's political crisis of the late twentieth century, much of this literature carried with it a highly deterministic subtext, defined by Max Weber and by models of political behavior borrowed from the United States and European experiences.

Studies of Asian politics tend to follow one of two divergent analytic strategies. Area specialists emphasize the importance of Asian culture in shaping the politics and economics of those nations, whereas comparative theorists apply broader models of political behavior to the Asian context. Robert Compton seeks to integrate these two traditions, which generally speak past one another, by proposing a promising (albeit somewhat limited) model of the dynamics of democratization in East and Southeast Asia. The model explicitly incorporates the distinctive cultures of these nations as the central causal factor explaining the process of democratization and the characteristics of the democratic polities that have emerged in the region. Furthermore, in terms of normative questions, Compton uses this analysis to critique both sides in the current debate between advocates of democracy and critics who claim that democracy is incompatible with “Asian values.'' Thus, East Asian Democratization should be of interest to a wide variety of scholars concerned with Asian politics or with theories of democratization.

Amitav Acharya has produced an innovative and stimulating evaluation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a crucial juncture in that organization's development. Acharya does not shrink from the challenge of measuring ASEAN's rhetoric of regional cooperation against its actual accomplishments, and the theoretical and empirical sophistication that Acharya displays makes this book sure to be a key work on the security and political aspects of ASEAN for academics and policymakers.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church is seen as an obstacle to progressive social and political change in Latin America. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the Second Vatican Council and the growth of liberation theology prompted doctrinal and institutional changes in the church in Brazil and several other countries. From an ally of the conservative oligarchy and establishment, the church turned into an engine of mobilization for grassroots movements and a focal point for popular opposition to authoritarian governments. One of the more significant and widely researched changes in the “popular church” was the establishment of thousands of ecclesiastical base communities (CEBs) among the poor. The fact that the majority of CEB participants are women has received far less attention.

The Outsider is a study of prejudicial attitudes toward migrants in Italy. The book contributes to the study of public reactions to non-European Union immigration because it statistically analyzes opinions that are usually addressed descriptively. Moreover, the work correctly studies the interaction between individual and social responses to migration. However, the overall contribution of this book to the comparative literature on xenophobia in Europe is limited by serious theoretical and methodological flaws.

The politics of neoliberal reform in Latin America has produced a number of impressions that are more or less widely held, but not necessarily entirely accurate. For example, many critics of the neoliberal reform process see it as a creature of Washington and Wall Street—views of economic development imposed on vulnerable, debt-ridden Latin American governments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank play crucial roles as carriers of the “Washington Consensus” and enforcers of its policy prescriptions. In this view, insulated technocrats—often with U.S. economics degrees—implement these essentially unpopular programs without consultation, oversight, or any societal participation. “Delegative democracy” and populations battered by a decade or more of debt and inflation help explain the extent to which these unelected and unaccountable technocrats have been able to promote this agenda. A narrow electoral coalition, anchored by wealth holders and conservative ideologues, has maintained the political space for these insulated technocrats to continue, despite deep opposition from societal groups such as labor.

Organized Crime and Democratic Governability offers an insightful look at one of the most critical and vexing questions of the contemporary era: To what extent is democratic governance possible when it coexists with organized crime? John Bailey' and Roy Godson's edited volume analyzes the many dimensions of the deeply entrenched obstacles to democratic stability in modern Mexico, perhaps an ideal case study for such an inquiry. The reach of organized crime there has long tended to undermine the very lifeblood of democracy, namely, its procedures. As a result, throughout the sweep of Mexico's postrevolutionary history, the roots of democracy have not been firmly planted. This chronic condition cannot quickly be remedied. Consequently, the editors conclude, organized crime in its various manifestations will continue to present “a significant challenge to democratic governability in Mexico” (p. 218).

From Tribal Village to Global Village does an excellent job of showing how indigenous peoples in Latin America have gone from victims to protagonists in struggles to control their own fate. Like Alison Brysk's previous work on human rights activities in Argentina during the “dirty war,” this book investigates political dynamics involving nonstate actors at the interface between international relations and comparative politics. Key to these dynamics is the idea that “above all, globalization involves the growing presence, use, and salience of information both in national and local struggles and as a newly significant arena of international relations” (p. 12).

Much of the literature on environmental policymaking in the Global South focuses on the role of transnational linkages, wherein ideas regarding environmental management are transplanted by intergovernmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations in the North to governments in the South. The perception that environmental management concepts are primarily transferred in this way stems in part from the resonance that Ronald Inglehart's work on postmaterialist societies and environmental activism has had on the field, as well as a paucity of studies examining the dynamics of the domestic political players in the creation of natural resource management policies in the South. Paul Steinberg's work, Environmental Leadership in Developing Countries, addresses this particular puzzle and takes on the too-oft accepted notion that domestic policy entrepreneurs play a small supporting role at best in bringing about environmental policies in the Global South.

Drawing on a wealth of new information made available by the opening of the Comintern archives, Drew sheds the light of hindsight on the relationship between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and, in turn, the Soviet Comintern, the South African liberation movement, and the white and black trade union movements in the first half of the twentieth century. This rich book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of ties between the Comintern and its satellite parties as well as the early history of the South African antiapartheid movement. There are only two other major books on this period of party history, and both are memoirs of party members who try to establish a particular version of the record. Drew contests the teleology of their accounts of communist party history and instead weaves a contingent narrative that identifies major turning points that narrowed the possibility for a radical reorientation of the party (p. 281). It was not inevitable that the party would split and finally dissolve in the way it did—other outcomes were possible, almost until the end. That they were not taken was the layered result of personal and ideological rivalries and party alliances that made socialism, and socialists, perpetually weak and vulnerable in the context of South African politics.

In this thoroughly researched, well-organized, and clearly written work, John Turner raises important questions of comparative politics. The book is packed with facts and informed by ideas. You may well disagree with his conclusions, as I do. But you must give him credit for the seriousness of his concerns and his willingness to present the evidence, even though it can sometimes be used to support a different interpretation. “Over the past forty years,” he writes, when stating his central conclusion, “Europe has transformed the nature of British politics and Tory politics in particular” (p. 1). Contrary to a view common among political scientists that foreign policy normally has far less influence on electoral behavior than on domestic policy, he finds that Britain's relation to European integration has “gradually…moved to the heart of the domestic political agenda” (p. 1), radically altering the balance of power between the two main parties. As the Euroskeptical champions of national independence, the Conservatives have become “increasingly beleaguered over the issue,” thereby making it possible for Labour “to use Europe as a way of revitalizing the party's programme and image” (p. 2). He clearly would like to see terminal decline for the Conservatives and continued success for a social democratic Britain in a similarly collectivist Europe.

The essays in this ambitious volume take as their foil the democratic peace hypothesis: the claim that liberal democracies, while still going to war against nonliberal states, rarely wage war on one another. “This volume challenges the received international wisdom about democracy, liberalism, and war,” write the editors in the Introduction. “The democratic peace, with its transhistorical causal law based on fixed definitions of democracy and war and a nation-state ontology of the international, is far too simplistic a frame from which to analyze the various historical and contemporary configurations of democracy, liberalism, and war” (p. 2).

This book deals with the politics of abortion and abortion law reform as they have developed in 11 countries of Western Europe and North America during the period of the women's movement's second wave. The stories that are told vary a good deal, even among countries apparently similar in religious composition, political tradition, and legal culture. They include the early and comparatively uncontroversial move to allow abortion on grounds of the mother's physical or mental health in Great Britain, more radical reform in the Netherlands making early abortion available on demand, and the continuing division in Ireland where judicial affirmation of a woman's right to travel outside the country must be counted a win. It is an interesting and worthwhile book for this alone.

Over the past decade, Russia's attempted transition to a market economy has attracted a great deal of scholarly interest. Given the complexities at hand and the rather disappointing outcome, it is natural that debates have been acrimonious at times. Some have argued that we are witnesses to a great success; others, that we are seeing a monumental failure. A book that promises to deal with “building market institutions in Russia” might harbor yet another contribution to such debates, but that is not case. Timothy Frye is careful to note (on p. 12) that his book “does not attempt a holistic analysis of the process of economic and political reform in Russia.”

The claim is often made by political activists that the international human rights system is dependent upon nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Ann Marie Clark documents this claim with respect to Amnesty International's achievements. The core of the book is a set of three case studies: the development of the Convention against Torture; the creation of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, along with the unfinished story of attempts to produce a convention against disappearances; and the creation of the Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions, followed by the drafting of a UN “Manual” on prevention and investigation of extrajudicial executions. These case studies are not simply presented as empirical accounts of the diplomatic history. They are structured by portraying each as a four-stage political process, in which Amnesty International collated information on the nature of human rights abuses, built consensus around the principle that the pattern of behavior was morally unacceptable, constructed international norms to express this principle as standards of behavior, and then sought to have application of the norms monitored at both the domestic and the international level.