The overriding theme of this very insightful work from distinguished presidential scholar Fred I. Greenstein is stated in the opening pages: “The United States is said to have a government of laws and institutions rather than individuals, but as these examples remind us, it is one in which the matter of who occupies the nation's highest office can have profound repercussions” (p. 2). Greenstein's analysis of presidential leadership styles from FDR to Clinton corroborates his theme by demonstrating the extent to which the aggrandizement of the presidency since the New Deal has left the American polity at the mercy of the skills and personalities of the holders of the office. As Greenstein himself points out (p. 3) parliamentary systems, with their more collective leadership, place more partisan and institutional constraints on the head of government. In contrast, the centrality of the presidency to the American system of government since the New Deal and the extent to which the institution is driven by the individual style of respective officeholders provide a recurrent and pervasive element of instability in American national government. Yet this very instability is also perhaps the office's most useful attribute. In a system characterized largely by gridlock it provides intermittent and necessary innovation and dynamism. The presidency's' greatest shortcoming, its highly protean nature, is also, ironically, its greatest value as a political institution.

For years, congressional elections were ignored or treated as fairly straightforward and predictable. The Democrats controlled the House. Incumbents nearly always won. Voters chose the candidate who would deliver the local goods. The magnitude of the Republican victory in the 1994 midterms set politicians, journalists, and scholars on a search to find an explanation that would place the election in the proper context. Was 1994 an outlier or the beginning of a new era? This volume places the 1990s in the context of the past 40 years of House elections and provides a solid foundation for gauging whether 1994 was the culmination of long-term trends or a dramatic break with the past.

Sciabarra's book attempts to conjoin dialectics with libertarianism to produce total freedom. He is led to this seemingly odd conjunction by a concatenation of concerns. He sees dialectics as the logic or method most attentive to contexts and libertarianism as a radical political ideology of freedom. He sees the opportunity to free dialectics of its totalitarian (including Marxist) overtones and libertarianism of its apparent irrelevance, which is the more galling now that once-popular Marxism has failed as radical social theory. He wishes to combine his own academic appreciation of the dialectical elements of Marx's method with his long-standing love of libertarian ideas. Primarily, he hopes to expand libertarian thought from a narrow concentration on economic self-interest and the state as repressive to a broader concern with the cultural, social, and historical preconditions of freedom, and he sees dialectics, with its emphasis on contexts, dynamism, and relations, as a method that can be appropriated by libertarians to realize these broader concerns and to propound a comprehensive and radical social theory. No longer need libertarian thought be seen as atomic individualism struggling for freedom against state violence; building on dialectical thinking shorn of its Marxist content, libertarians can embrace whole individuals living in rich social environments that can carry out, without violence, the social powers that the state has illegitimately appropriated.

Carolyn Heinrich, Laurence Lynn, and Carolyn Hill are public management and policy scholars who puzzle over the workings of government. Their efforts aim not only to add to our understanding of these workings but also to provide a template for future study. The first volume by Heinrich and Lynn is designed around a set of working papers originally introduced at a conference of government and policy scholars in May 1999 at the University of Arizona, and are oft referred to as “the Arizona papers.” The publication is the result of a research project funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to study best practices in government management. The second volume authored by Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill argues for a theoretical framework to guide future research.

George A. Krause has undertaken a statistical analysis of the relationship between the president and the Congress and the enforcement activities of two regulatory agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice for the years 1949–92. He finds that the president and the Congress often influenced each other, but neither of the political branches succeeded in dominating the bureaucracies. These findings are consistent with the interpretations of presidential-congressional-bureaucratic power of most journalists, sociologists, historians, political scientists, and public administration scholars.

Lisa Keister's work offers students of research methods, and of public policy, an ideal model. It also offers, albeit indirectly, a study that should inform policy makers as they discuss proposals to alter inheritance and estate tax policies and privatize Social Security. Wealth in America explores the distribution of household resources from 1962 through 1995. Questions regarding the distribution of wealth in the United States are seldom addressed directly because readily available data do not permit a straightforward approach. Because it is easier to deal with questions related to the distribution of income than with the distribution of wealth, research generally focuses on income distribution and we assume that there is a relatively straightforward relationship between the two. Keister tackles the data problems associated with measuring household assets allowing her to evaluate the distribution of wealth. Since measuring assets at any point in time is a challenge, it is all the more remarkable that she is able to examine changes in the distribution of household assets over time.

Writing on the outskirts of Hollywood, where my college campus episodically turns into a set location for the filming of West Wing or, most recently, Pearl Harbor, I have picked up a few pointers about the biz just by keeping my ears perked. “Talk to me, babe! Luv ya. My agent will get back to you on that. What's my motivation?” And so on. Clichés and formulas do matter, however, in such a large-scale collaborative enterprise because often they provide the underlying rules of the game. The first rule of screenwriting, any insider knows, is that you must hook your reader on page one. If you do not grab your audience right from the start, even before the opening credits roll, the rest of the spec script will surely get tossed, and the movie will never get made.

This book aims to explain why funding levels for breast cancer research suddenly achieved extensive media coverage, as well as both attention and action from Congress and the White House, in the period between 1990 and 1993. Maureen Hogan Casamayou's answer : the effective mobilization of legions of angry women and their allies by entrepreneurial leaders in a new breast cancer coalition. She tells the story of how these women came together, charted strategy, and succeeded in expanding federal funding.

Interest in strategic approaches to an understanding of judicial decision making, including the implications of the separation of powers (SOP), has grown dramatically in recent years. Unfortunately, almost all the research on these SOP interactions has been limited to those involving the U.S. Supreme Court. Laura Langer's book provides a refreshing alternative to the exclusive Supreme Court focus by examining the significance of separation of powers concerns for the exercise of judicial review by state supreme courts.

Mark Smith has written a dense, challenging, and provocative analysis of three contrasting approaches to power and how they are shaped by different philosophies of social science. This is not a book for the theoretically faint-hearted or meta-theoretically challenged. Indeed, those who pick it up expecting to find a simple guide to recent state theory will be badly disappointed. For it does not provide a survey or critique of state theory as such. Nor does it provide a new theory based on self-evident assumptions about the nature of the state and politics. Instead its author offers a sustained meta-theoretical commentary on the intellectual conditions of possibility of serious engagement with the state and state power from a broader, societal perspective. Smith attempts this because he discerns a crisis in the taken-for-grantedness of the typical objects of inquiry of such disciplines as economics, politics, and sociology. He claims that their respective objects are increasingly seen as complex, uncertain, and contested spaces and that these disciplines themselves have become disoriented. Inter alia, this requires a rethinking of the state as an analytical object. In pursuing this meta-theoretical project, Smith draws heavily on the “critical realist” position (initially known as “transcendental realism” or “critical naturalism”) of the British-based philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar. Thus his analysis begins with some crucial distinctions among empiricism, idealism, and realism and explores their different ontological, epistemological, methodological, and substantive implications for the analysis of social relations. It then addresses the philosophical and theoretical development of three very different theorists of power, who are taken as interesting if not wholly representative exemplars of empiricism, idealism, and a mixture of idealism and realism, respectively. Smith concludes with some of his own meta-theoretical comments on state theory.

Mention Richard Cortner's name and political scientists think of “stories” of court cases well and thoroughly told. Cortner's latest effort is another superb contribution to this line of work. In this work he focuses on the two cases in which the constitutionality of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA) was tested—the Heart of Atlanta Motel case and the “Ollie's Barbeque” case.

Research on political movements remains peripheral to the discipline of political science, or, to put it more optimistically, outstanding research on political movements has relied upon interdisciplinary and intersubfield research strategies and is building an increasing presence within the discipline. The importance and emergence of this arena of scholarship make it difficult not to celebrate Christine Kelly's Tangled Up in Red, White, and Blue, a work that offers a synthesis of political theory and empirical political movement research, employing comparative case studies of several new social movements in the United States.

In this case study of the 1990 Red Apple Boycott of two Korean-owned produce stores in Brooklyn, New York, Claire Kim narrates a complex story of resurgent Black Nationalism, the rise of Korean resistance to blacks, and the fateful temporizing of Mayor David Dinkins, whose belated crossing of the boycott picket lines deeply injured his mayoralty. Kim has high ambitions in telling this story; she wishes to use it to displace a flawed “racial scapegoating” theory of black–Korean relations and to advance in its stead her own theory of “racial ordering” in the United States.

Of the many endeavors in the last three decades to restate the central aspirations of liberalism, this important work is one of the most balanced, nuanced, and cogent. Part of its success lies in its willingness to stretch the boundaries of what we call liberalism, but in doing so, Spragens only brings liberal theory into better alignment with intuitions and sensibilities underlying liberal practice.

James March, Martin Schulz, and Xueguang Zhou address the fascinating question of how rules evolve in a complex organization with a unique data set. Stanford University was founded in the decades before the turn of the last century. The authors searched and coded a vast Stanford archive of materials on rules related to student contact, the student honor system, faculty appointment and tenure procedures, faculty governance, and finally rules related to accounting, purchasing, and other administrative functions of a university. They are able to examine questions concerning the external and internal stimulants to rule creation, change, and suspension. No other book equals this one in regard to the breadth of the questions asked and the mode of analysis.

One recent approach to the study of public policy has been policy design. And one component of this is the concept of target populations. Perhaps the strongest case for the importance of target populations as a focus for research has been advanced in the work of Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram. They have argued that target populations help to shape the construction of public policies. If target populations are politically weak and have negative constructions (for instance, drug users and drug dealers), then policies will tend to be harsh and punitive—penalties rather than benefits. In part, this serves political purposes, since one would get “political points” for being harsh with those who have little power and are perceived as “bad” people. In the process, bad policy may result, since the construction of target populations and policies aimed at them may have little to do with actually solving complex social problems.

Given the recent events in the realm of presidential policymaking over the past decade, Kenneth R. Mayer has produced a timely book chronicling the use of executive orders that will be of considerable interest to political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and journalists alike. Existing research on the topic of executive orders has been largely addressed by constitutional legal scholars who possess little interest in emphasizing a generalizable understanding of this tool of executive authority. In recent years, a small yet growing-body of political science research has tried to obtain a social scientific–motivated portrait regarding the institutional and behavioral dimensions of executive order issuance by presidents. Mayer makes a strong case for using new institutional economics (NIE) as a “way of making sense of the wide range of executive orders issued over the years” (p. 28). The NIE theoretical approach that Mayer applies to presidential leadership takes a long-term view, compared to other works on presidential leadership, by positing “that presidents can achieve substantive (policy) results not simply by giving commands, but by creating and altering institutional structures and processes” (p. 29).

Why do policymakers in any one given jurisdiction choose one approach rather than another for dealing with the common public policy challenge of deciding how to revise state and provincial automobile insurance regulatory regimes? And even within any one specific political jurisdiction (of a North American subnational “universe” of 50 states plus 10 provinces), why do policy outcomes change over time? What determines legislative policy decisions?

Jacqueline Stevens grapples with the meanings of political society and affiliation and how we think about what constitutes family, nation, ethnicity, and race. How do we come to know ourselves and others through these political artifices and naturalized identities? Her project is to trouble our complacencies and make visible the arbitrary practices that produce the inclusions and exclusions of the “state-nation” (p. 43). She examines democratic, communitarian, and liberal theories of political society and finds little attention there to the problem of membership and the ways groups are constituted. Birth, the family, ethnicity, and national origin are undertheorized or considered to derive from natural, ancestral ties. Stevens addresses these inadequacies, and superbly reveals the centrality of birth and kinship practices to political societies.

This account of the development of Walt Disney World in Florida is an engaging contribution to the growing literature on tourism and urban politics. The many pleasures of reading this book include learning that Disney World was initially slated for St. Louis, that Henry Kissinger declared that Epcot would enhance world peace more than this shuttle diplomacy, that Disney prepared a proposal for a HUD planning grant for Disney World, and that even Walt Disney thought that Disneyland Anaheim was tacky. Foglesong meticulously details more than three decades of negotiations among the Walt Disney corporate conglomerate, the city of Orlando, and Orange and Osceola counties in Florida over the location and development of Walt Disney World and its spinoff theme parks. Not surprisingly, the Mouse wins most of the battles.