The Wheel of Law: India's Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context. By Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344p. $39.50.

Since its birth in 1947, India has presented an enigma to many social scientists. A country with a huge population—many living in rather grim circumstances of illiteracy, poverty and despair, bearing a historical legacy of hegemonic rule under the Mughals or the British, and professing a traditional culture marked by deference to authority and hierarchic social arrangements—does not present ideal conditions for democracy to flourish. But India confounded many pundits simply by surviving, indeed succeeding, as a pluralist and constitutional polity. However, one development that may be undermining that confidence is the emergence of an aggressive religious movement coalescing around the sangh parivar (i.e., the cluster of organizations dedicated to the principles of Hindutva), the extremist Hindu identity movement whose electoral success and social agenda is threatening to unravel one of the cherished pillars of India's democracy—its self-conscious and determined commitment to a secular order. Gary Jacobsohn's book explores the challenges this development poses from within a jurisprudential and comparative perspective, including in his analysis references and themes relevant to Israel and the United States as well.

Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages. By Debra Javeline. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 312p. $60.00.

Why, in the face of massive delays in the payment of wages throughout the Russian Federation during the 1990s, did so few Russian workers engage in organized protest? This empirical puzzle has important implications not only for understanding how the fragile post-Soviet regime managed to endure more than a decade of severe socioeconomic crisis, but also for general theories of social mobilization. In her highly original and thought-provoking book, Debra Javeline argues that the relative quiescence of Russian workers can be explained parsimoniously: In the face of the complexities of post-Soviet political and economic transition, workers could not collectively decide who was to blame for wage arrears, and hence could not organize effective protests against any particular individual or institution.

Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State: Path Dependence and Policy Diffusion. By Junko Kato. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 276p. $55.00.

Studies of the welfare state in democratic capitalist systems rarely explore comprehensively the political, economic, and institutional linkages between social programs and tax structure; analysts of tax policy rarely explicate systematically the political consequences of tax structure for social benefit programs. Junko Kato's new book is an engaging, albeit incomplete, effort to fill this void.

Retiring the State: The Politics of Pension Privatization in Latin America and Beyond. By Raúl Madrid. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 336p. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Since the Pinochet regime in Chile privatized its public pension system in 1981, several Latin American countries have enacted public pension reforms, usually incorporating some structural reform or privatization. Why have some countries privatized their public pensions (Chile, Mexico, Bolivia), while others add optional private pensions (Argentina, Uruguay), create parallel systems with both public and private pensions (Colombia, Peru), or fail to enact any structural reform (Brazil)? Retiring the State will be required reading for those interested in the answer to this question.

Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 468p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Occasionally, when you have really talented graduate students, you are looking for a book that would challenge them to think deeply about their research. This is such a book. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer have put together an excellent volume that takes up some of the most challenging problems regarding questions about research design, how to think about causality in the social sciences, and how to connect questions about ontology to research methods.

The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development. By Isabela Mares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 342p. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Since the 1970s, the power resources model has been the dominant approach to comparative studies of welfare state development. The strength of labor unions and left-wing political parties has been used to explain cross-national variation in both the structure and substance of modern social policies. However, in recent years, a number of scholars have challenged this labor-centered perspective by questioning the notion that capitalists uniformly oppose social insurance or that passage of meaningful reforms can only occur when business interests are politically marginalized.

Global Environmentalism and Local Politics: Transnational Advocacy Networks in Brazil, Ecuador, and India. By Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 195p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book brings a new angle to the study of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) by making local choices, priorities, and outcomes the central focus of its analysis. TANs link actors at local, national, and international levels in campaigns across national boundaries. As Maria Guadalupe Moag Rodrigues points out, most such studies have focused on the campaigns' impacts on governmental policies or on public opinion. Her focus is on a network's influence on a part of itself instead. Are local participants empowered by TANs to formulate their own autonomous conceptions of sustainable development and to gain institutionalized mechanisms to articulate those? To answer these questions, a focus on the internal dynamics of politics, resources, cohesion, and legitimacy in the network becomes central. This is not a wholly new approach and is actually quite common in other fields, but does represent a departure from many studies of similar phenomena in political science. Rodrigues argues that it is especially important to look at the impact on local network members because that is central for local outcomes.

The Futures of European Capitalism. By Vivien A. Schmidt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 376p. $18.95.

This is a multilevel book that deals with a multilayered topic. It operates on three levels, the national, the European, and the global, and has three distinct (albeit related) objectives. The first objective is to chart the courses that the three main types of European capitalism (liberal, state, and managed) have taken since the 1970s, and then to detail the pressures that have pushed these “national capitalisms” along these different paths. The second objective is to bring the European Union back into discussions of the European political economy. This may seem a surprising objective given the vast amount of ink spilled on the EU in general, but Vivien Schmidt attempts to disaggregate the effects of “Europeanization” from those of “Globalization” and thus give a more nuanced account of the pressures facing European states. The third objective is to “bring discourse back in,” thereby giving greater analytic specificity to our understandings of institutional change and economic adjustment. This is a big and bold book.

Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada. By Stuart N. Soroka. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002. 168p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

The literature on agenda setting has gathered momentum in recent years by tapping into garbage-can models, exploring the dynamics of policy subsystems and decision making, and relying on increasingly sophisticated empirical techniques. Stuart Soroka makes two important contributions with this book: First, he develops an integrating framework for the sprawling literature on agenda setting, and second, he attempts to measure and test hypotheses on agenda-setting dynamics in a parliamentary and federal political system.

Dismantling Democratic States. By Ezra Suleiman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 368p. $39.50.

Market-driven administrative reform has been the leitmotif of profound, perhaps even unprecedented, public sector reform across the Western world for the past decade or so. It is indicative that even in Sweden (the place of writing), a country that has been fairly slow in adopting this model of administrative reform, authorities such as the Migration Board and the Prison and Probation Board nowadays define their clients as “customers.”

The Military and Politics in Post-Authoritarian Chile. By Gregory Weeks. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003. 248p. $47.50 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Since the coup of September 1973, no one can deny that the Chilean political system has been influenced by the armed forces. A democracy that had earlier distinguished itself as one of the most stable and durable in Latin America has had to fight to recover its reputation, and continues to do so. The outgoing Pinochet dictatorship made sure to leave its imprint on the Chilean constitution and democratic institutions in an attempt to protect military interests into the future. To what extent have these efforts obstructed the civilian quest for supremacy over the armed forces? To what extent are civilians gradually gaining the upper hand?

Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. By M. Hakan Yavuz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 352p. $49.95.

In November 2002, Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the majority of the votes in the general elections and formed the government. AKP's electoral victory was a major development in Turkish politics, one that was the culmination of the growing importance of Islamic identity since the 1980s, but it also reflected the impact of the liberalization of the country's economy and politics in the 1990s. AKP was formed by a breakaway faction of the main Turkish Islamic political movement, disavowing that movement's more contentious Islamic demands in order to adopt a moderate and democratic platform. The meteoric rise of a party with origins in Islamic activism in the most secular Muslim country, one that has served as the paragon for secularism across the Muslim world, is a member of NATO, and is an aspirant to membership in the European community, has raised a number of interesting questions. There is much in the example of Turkey that is instructive for the study of Islamic activism, but there has so far been a dearth of studies on the subject. Hakan Yavuz's seminal study seeks to fill that lacuna.

Ambiguity and Choice in Public Policy: Political Decision Making in Modern Democracies. By Nikolaos Zahariadis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. 208p. $26.95.

Nikolaos Zahariadis has written an interesting and ambitious book that extends to other countries and later stages of the policy process John Kingdon's classic insight into agenda setting—that policies are the result of streams of problems, solutions, and politics, coupled by policy entrepreneurs when windows of opportunity open.

Food Fights over Free Trade: How International Institutions Promote Agricultural Trade Liberalization. By Christina L. Davis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 416p. $39.50.

Christina Davis's book adds two important insights to our understanding of trade negotiations. First, Davis persuasively argues that complex international institutional factors can alter domestic protection of agriculture. Using the European Union and Japan as cases and marshaling sophisticated statistical evidence, she details historical patterns by which agricultural policy became linked to wider issues and, in the process, allowed trade liberalization to overcome the political advantages that small, well-organized groups, such as farm interests, possess. Second, she documents the contingent character of the politics of trade negotiations. Outcomes emerge not only from negotiating decisions, such as choice in agenda setting and the use of threats, but also from forces external to the negotiations per se, such as budget pressures.

Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity. By Kevin C. Dunn. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 228p. $79.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Created to conceal foreign exploitation of ivory and rubber, the Congo represented the instrument of an extractive colonization system, before turning violent and paternalistic. The Congo is the most egregious example of the ruthless exploitation of Africans for riches. Its independence came suddenly and unexpectedly in 1960, the peaceful handover of power being marred only by flashes of bad temper and recrimination. Once independent, the country descended into five years of sheer chaos combining mutinies, secessions, rebellions, coups, and a botched UN intervention, followed by several years of stifling arbitrary rule, predation, economic ruin, and civil war.

Designing Federalism: A Theory of Self-Sustainable Federal Institutions. By Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Olga Shvetsova. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 392p. $75.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

This book is a highly ambitious attempt to provide a general theory on the self-sustainability of democratic federal systems of government. The authors' central hypothesis is that federal states can reach an equilibrium when both state- and federal-level political actors have an incentive to make electoral and other concessions in order to maintain the federal order. In contrast to unitary states, however, the central design feature of federations is not how best to create institutions that ensure that elected politicians faithfully serve constituent interests, but rather the opposite: How can institutions be designed in such a way that the politicians can become imperfect agents of the voters? For if the federation is to evolve into a stable polity, state-level elected representatives must persuade their voters that their interests must be put to one side, at least in the shorter term, because of the sacrifices involved in ceding power to the federal government. Similarly, federal-level politicians have to persuade their constituents to grant policy and other concessions to state governments.

The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas. Edited by Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 440p. $75.00.

Realists see systemic competition as the key to international politics and expect states to converge on something like “best practice” under this competitive pressure. For realists, this should be especially true for military practices, where the penalties for suboptimality are most severe. Realism thus predicts rapid and comprehensive diffusion of military methods, with all quickly emulating the state of the art as demonstrated by the strongest. This view is shared by policymakers who worry about technology transfer and its security implications: Can America preserve its current advantages in the use of networked information and precision weaponry as technology and ideas spread to potential challengers?

Building Democracy in Contemporary Russia: Western Support for Grassroots Organizations. By Sarah L. Henderson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 224p. $29.95.

Sarah Henderson has written a courageous and eye-opening account of Western programs to create civil society in Russia. After having spent 12 months conducting surveys and interviews with more than a hundred activists of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a dozen Russian cities, as well as doing consultancy work for three major foreign foundations over a seven-year period, Henderson has provided one of the first comprehensive looks at the impact that Western democracy aid—now a $7 billion industry—has had in Russia (p. 5). Her disturbing conclusion is that, despite good intentions, such programs have been counterproductive.

Regions of War and Peace. By Douglas Lemke. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 235p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

I highly recommend Douglas Lemke's book to all scholars and students who study international conflict and war. This study is an extension of work conducted by the author since the early 1990s, some of which was published in the major quantitatively oriented journals in the field of international politics. The book integrates and advances the theoretical arguments and empirical findings of those earlier studies and makes a notable contribution in the area of peace and conflict analysis. I believe that although it is of primary interest to scholars, it may prove useful in advanced undergraduate classes on international relations and in graduate-level courses on international conflict.

Economic Interdependence and International Conflict: New Perspectives on an Enduring Debate. Edited by Edward D. Mansfield and Brian M. Pollins. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 286p. $70.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

International trade is often wrapped up in a package with many good things—wealth, development, democracy, and peace. The proposition that increased trade is related to pacific international relations is one of the most well-known tenets of liberal theory. Despite its long history in political thought, the relationship between trade and peace has not been subject to extensive and systematic analysis until recently. In this edited volume, Edward D. Mansfield and Brian M. Pollins collect some of the most current thinking addressing the theoretical and methodological issues that arise in the quest to conceptualize and test the relationship between economic interdependence and international conflict. Understanding this relationship is important both theoretically and for policy reasons: Many policymakers today assume that increased trade will create a more peaceful world.