Robert H. Bates's new book When Things Fell Apart seeks to make a contribution in two different areas. Explicitly, it joins a large literature on why state institutions collapsed in sub-Saharan Africa, especially why leaders drove one economy after the next into the ground. Less emphatically stated but clear enough from the book's content and its structure is an important contribution to political science's “culture wars” over the use of different types of evidence, especially the sometimes competing claims for the primacy of country knowledge, game-theoretic modeling, and large cross-national data sets. In particular, Bates uses a deductive approach, where game-theoretic approaches are married to national outcomes through a deep immersion in the literature and intuition (a concept he clearly seeks to rehabilitate) and then tested by the use of a significant and original database that is nonetheless relegated to an appendix. This is a particularly important approach because no one would accuse Bates of being at all hostile to large-scale quantitative analysis. Indeed, the significant data collection at Harvard's Africa Research Program (http://africa.gov.harvard.edu), which he helped found, is a service to the discipline.

Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. By Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 345p. $35.00.

One inevitable result of the recent U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been renewed scholarly interest in the determinants of wartime public opinion. In a recent influential article, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler (“Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]: 7–46) argue that casualty tolerance is primarily shaped by prospective beliefs about likely success and retrospective judgments regarding the “rightness” of the decision to initiate the conflict. This rationalist account of wartime public opinion suggests that the mass public will accept the costs of war if they are exceeded by attainable and important benefits.

If history is any judge, Republicans should lose control of Congress or the White House during one of the five elections to come between now and 2015. Since Democrats and Republicans became national competitors in 1855, unified party control has lasted on average just 5.9 years. Unified Republican control has endured a bit longer, averaging 6.3 years. Even at its longest (with the onset of the 1896 realignment), Republican control of government has lasted just fourteen years. With the current Republican regime emerging from the elections of 2000, Republican control of Congress and the White House should have run its course by the elections of 2014.Sarah A. Binder is professor of political science at George Washington University ([email protected]) and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. By Stephen Biddle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 312p. $37.50.

Stephen Biddle has written a worthy book on the never-ending debate over why land wars are won and lost. It contributes to the academic literature, and his policy judgments deserve attention. He puts forth the theory that “force employment” (i.e., doctrine for using military forces in battle) plays a major role in determining outcomes, as big a role as the size of contending forces and the sophistication of their technologies. He further argues that modern employment doctrine, which enables skilled ground forces to negate the effects of lethal fires against them, was born in late World War I, when attackers finally overcame entrenched defenses. A skilled operations research analyst of tactical battles, Biddle offers a multimethod approach that combines logical reasoning, case studies, mathematical models, statistical analysis, and dynamic simulations. His book can be read by nonspecialists, but many of its technical discussions (e.g., Lanchester equations) require expert knowledge.

The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Reassessment. By Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 302p. $80.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The English School, although still not mainstream, is now increasingly recognized as one of the significant approaches to the study of international relations. In their attempts to map the parameters of the field, for example, both Steven D. Krasner in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999) and Alexander Wendt in Social Theory of International Politics (1999) position the English School alongside more familiar schools of thought. There is also now a section of the International Studies Association devoted to the English School and it sponsored more than a dozen panels at the 2007 convention in Chicago. As the prominence of the English School has risen, so has the need for a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of its development and defining ideas.