I am grateful for Eric Uslaner's thoughtful review of my book. The exchange between us highlights for me, above all, the benefits of reading and conversing across disciplinary boundaries. Uslaner correctly notes that my book refers relatively little to a vast political science literature on corruption. My aim was to understand corruption in Nigeria as it is experienced by ordinary citizens, rather than to contribute to Western analytical debates about (possibly) more universal aspects of corruption and its consequences. But I certainly acknowledge and accept that my own analysis and understanding (as well as the larger contribution of my book) would have benefited from a deeper engagement with the political science literature on corruption. I would quibble with his contrast between anthropologists' “stories” and political scientists' “data.” To me, real people's lives and narratives are among the most powerful data in the social sciences—but that is why I am an anthropologist.

In Charles Dickens's novel about capitalism run amok, a teacher asks: “Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation, and an't you in a thriving state?” “Girl number twenty” (the teacher doesn't dignify the pupils with names) later confides to a friend how she got it all wrong: “I said I didn't know. I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all” (Hard Times [1854] 1997, 64).

Democracy and Elections in Africa. By Steffan Lindberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This book is an original, important, and in many ways impressive study that will make a contribution to both electoral and Africanist scholarship. The author's central argument is that repetitive elections (three or more) increase the democratic qualities of regimes and broaden and deepen civil liberties in societies. This argument is carefully placed within democratic theory and rigorously tested by a dense and generally sophisticated empirical analysis, although I have criticisms regarding the tightness of the theory and two variables used in the empirical analysis.

Melissa Schwartzberg intelligently raises the important question of how we might move from the ideal of the value theory democracy, to which she is sympathetic, to its institutionalization. I share the concern she voices about the extent to which democratic contractualism can be directly applied in democratic institutions, but I differ with the conclusion she draws in response to this concern.

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 320p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

“What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!” Bruno Latour begins The Politics Of Nature with this provocative statement (p. 1). What follows is a creative reconceptualization of the relationship among nature, science, and politics with profound implications for the future of ecological change, traditional right/left ideologies, and modern political processes, including globalization.

Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics. By Carol Lancaster. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 284p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This book addresses an important issue—namely, why governments give aid—and offers a comparison of five countries since 1945: the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Denmark. Each country occupies its own chapter, with systematic comparison being assisted by a common set of headings relating to the main domestic sources of influence: ideas, institutions, interests, and government organization. Two opening chapters set the stage and offer a brief history of aid's purposes. A rather short concluding chapter sums up the findings. No other book has the same agenda. Carol Lancaster's analysis benefits greatly from her position as an “insider” for 13 years on and off in the U.S. government, working on aid issues, and from the opportunity to interview around a hundred aid officials and expert commentators in the five countries during 2002–3.

To whom should political scientists address themselves? Should we be content to pursue more or less purely intra-disciplinary concerns, whether those be driven by some specialist “literature” or by one or another preferred method of inquiry? Is it intellectually responsible to do so? Do we have the tools or capacity to do otherwise? Given the fallible character of even our most confidently held research findings, what are the ethical or intellectual consequences of addressing ourselves to audiences in the world of law or policy or politics? And given that any potential interlocutors in those extra-disciplinary, non-academic domains quite legitimately have interests and agendas of their own, how should we anticipate the knowledge claims we advance might fare on various terrains of contest and power? These questions and others are central to the mission of this journal.