Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. Edited by Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 304p. $24.95.

Latin America's indigenous peoples' social movements are gaining increasing attention from political scientists. Once the exclusive interest of anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, by the 1990s political scientists could no longer ignore the implications of the emergence of regional, national, and international indigenous political actors for the development of democracy and the state. By the end of the decade, political scientists had produced a handful of scholarly books on indigenous peoples' politics (e.g., Alison Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America, 2000; Donna Lee Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America, 2000; Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge, 2005) and many other comparative and monographic studies are in the publishing pipeline or at the dissertation stage.

Interstate Economic Relations. By Joseph F. Zimmerman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 308p. $60.00.

Scholars of American federalism have focused much more attention on relations between federal and state governments than they have on those among states. Joseph F. Zimmerman is the exception. Although this book is replete with an impressive number of citations, it is Zimmerman himself who has almost single-handedly rectified this state of affairs. His earlier publications on national–state relations, including federal preemption, federal mandates, and federal–state commissions, were the precursors to two comprehensive examinations of interstate relations. In Interstate Relations: The Neglected Dimension of Federalism (1996), Zimmerman laid out basic premises of interstate relations within the American federal system. In Interstate Economic Relations, he expands considerably those premises, illustrates them with case studies of economic competition and cooperation among the states, and presents impressive evidence of the critical role of the U.S. Supreme Court as parameter-setting referee.

Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000. By M. Anne Pitcher. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 320p. $60.00.

Mozambique provides a sharp contrast with transition in much of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and even Asia. A Marxist movement (Frelimo) took power in 1975, pledging to construct a socialist state. Only 15 years later, a new constitution made no reference to socialism. By 1994, Mozambique was a multiparty democracy and one of the World Bank's “model” market reformers. Yet Frelimo remains in power, presiding over the private economy it once denounced. Why and how did this happen?

Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. By Samuel P. Huntington. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. 448p. $27.00.

Samuel Huntington suggests in this book that American national identity is threatened by a tidal wave of Latino—primarily Mexican—immigrants who are refusing to assimilate to American “Anglo-Protestant” values, and who are facilitated in this resistance by the erosion of elite support for those very same values. That erosion is a consequence of the “cults of multiculturalism and diversity” (p. 144) that have collectively “denounced the idea of Americanization,” “downgraded the centrality of English,” and “advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences” (p. 142), strong charges indeed.

Oral Arguments and Decision Making on the United States Supreme Court. By Timothy R. Johnson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 180p. $35.00.

This book makes a persuasive thesis that the oral arguments presented in cases before the United States Supreme Court are used by the justices to help them arrive at substantive legal and policy decisions that closely parallel their preferred outcomes. Although that would seem to be logical, the author documents that many scholars who write about the Court do not share this thesis. Those scholars, such as the so-called attitudinalists, posit that oral arguments have no effect on justices' votes. In order to reinforce his thesis, Timothy Johnson uses the strategic model of decision making, namely, that justices are goal oriented, they are strategic, and they account for institutional rules. He then goes on to explain that because the briefs presented to the Court from both the litigants and from amici curiae are understandably biased in behalf of their particular points of view, the oral arguments serve to solve this problem.

Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies. By Russell J. Dalton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 230p. $45.00.

Russell Dalton has written an impressive, thoughtful, and useful comparative analysis of the origins, character, and consequences of variations in public support for a number of advanced industrial democracies, all of them long-term (since 1960) member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Following David Easton's landmark study (A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965), Dalton distinguishes three broad objects of political support—political communities, political regimes, and political authorities—and two types of support, diffuse and specific. These are operationalized by the author in Table 2.1. Most of his empirical data are derived from a variety of National Election Studies in member states, as well as World Value and Eurobarometer surveys. The book is organized in three parts.

Learning from Foreign Models in Latin American Policy Reform. Edited by Kurt Weyland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 320p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The purpose of this important volume, whose contributors include both policy practitioners and academics, is to “elucidate the cognitive and political processes that shape the diffusion of models in contemporary Latin America” (p. 2). In his introductory chapter, Kurt Weyland lays out a series of questions to help frame an assessment of the impact of foreign models on Latin American social policy reforms during the last two decades. When do policymakers turn to external models? What turns a country's policy practices into a model for others? How is information about a particular model spread abroad? What is the impact of transmitted models on policy decision makers and how, if at all, are they adapted to local conditions? Weyland argues that the concept of “learning” is better suited to addressing these questions than either the traditional rational choice or structuralist approaches alone, since learning creates “important filters between objective reality and actors' attitudes and actions” (p. 6). Various heuristic shortcuts are taken by policymakers that significantly alter the expected cost–benefit calculation that, it is often assumed, decides the diffusion of foreign models. This framework is applied fairly consistently in a series of case study chapters that focus on three social sector reforms carried out in the region: pension systems (Argentina, Brazil), unemployment insurance (Brazil, Chile) and health care (Colombia, Mexico).

The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence. Edited by Beverley Baines and Ruth Rubio-Marin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 356p. $75.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Comparative law remains a small and relatively isolated area of inquiry. There are two barriers to development of the field. First, with the exception of taxation law and, possibly, divorce, comparative analysis of law is of little use to practicing lawyers. Second, as I discovered in a project on comparative rape law, it is difficult to gain access to the primary data sources, especially outside North America and Western Europe. In addition, there are few opportunities for interdisciplinary study—despite the attention of the Law and Society Association. Those who are not legal scholars need guides to the technical aspects of legal research to make the work of specialists more accessible.

Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe. By Giovanni Capoccia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 352p. $49.95.

This study elaborates a central aspect of Juan Linz's (1978) Crisis, Breakdown, and Re-equilibration: a focus on choices made by democratic incumbents facing extremist challengers aiming to install nondemocratic rule. To put it in Linzian terms, Giovanni Capoccia seeks to develop Linz's “mentality” on that subject into a more systematic statement. Linz claimed that these leaders' choices are crucial, and he illustrated with examples; Capoccia rightly proposes that such a claim deserves monographic treatment in its own right. His effort is illuminating on several counts but falls short of full persuasiveness on others.

The Most Activist Supreme Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism. By Thomas M. Keck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 370p. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

The title of this work presents its thesis at the macrolevel, but it is with limited support that the author claims that the current Supreme Court is the “most activist.” The core argument of the book is actually presented in the last chapter in clear fashion. There, the author explicitly refers to the Court as the O'Connor Court since he determines that it is largely the blend of political conservatism and judicial moderation, long displayed by Sandra Day O'Connor, that encapsulates the modern Court. So the thesis is no more than stated as something of a straw man at the outset. Thomas Keck “reveals” that the political ideology (liberal/conservative) dimension of justices is not identical to the judicial activism/restraint dimension of their judicial perspectives. These are and always have been two separate dimensions, even if they may not be orthogonal. It is not clear why this is the first major point of the discussion.

From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation. By Barry Buzan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 318p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

The English School of international relations has been principally concerned with understanding the society of states, but some of its members have commented on its relationship with world society. Hedley Bull and Martin Wight noted that the architects of the modern society of states derived some of their political vocabulary from medieval conceptions of world society. Bull maintained that natural law images of a world society survived in the modern doctrine of universal human rights. Whether a world society was likely to develop in the first universal society of states was a question of great importance to Bull and John Vincent. The former referred to an emerging “cosmopolitan culture of modernity” that could underpin order between radically different societies in “the post-European age”; the latter believed a global culture that established the right of every human being to be free from starvation could perform that function. However, most members of the English School have denied that the modern society of states is likely to be dissolved in a world society. Indeed, Wight argued that from the Reformation, rival conceptions of world society have often had a divisive effect on international relations. Barry Buzan's most recent book is the first work by a member of the school to consider world society since Vincent's call for the more systematic investigation of the concept almost 15 years ago.

Politics Beyond the Capital: The Design of Subnational Institutions in South America. By Kent Eaton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 288p. $55.00.

This is a good book about an interesting and important subject: waves of centralizing and decentralizing change over time and across four different country cases. The book analyzes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay from the nineteenth century to the present. More specifically, Kent Eaton examines 30 periods of movement toward greater or lesser centralization—12 in Argentina, 6 in Brazil, 5 in Chile, and 7 in Uruguay.

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. By Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 596p. $90.00 cloth, $32.99 paper.

This book is based on the assumptions that the regional level of security has always been important, has grown in importance over the past seven or so decades, and has emerged as especially prominent with the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, neorealists are unable to recognize the increasing importance of regional interactions because they focus exclusively on the global level. Equally regrettable is the fact that newer globalization perspectives are unable to capture regional security relations adequately because they, too, severely downgrade the importance of states and/or assume that reactions to forces like globalization do not meaningfully differ across regions. Consequently, these prominent theoretical schools are increasingly unsuccessful at making sense of reality.

Popular Political Support in Urban China. By Jie Chen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 246p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

What is the matter with Beijing? China's capital is overcrowded and heavily polluted. Beijing's elderly face shrinking government pensions and health-care services. Its middle aged try to reinvent themselves out of unemployment. Its youth strive for jobs, with tens of millions of upwardly mobile rural Chinese flocking to the cities, and at the same time try to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of millions of other future middle-class urbanites struggling to enter the upper end of the global economy. Despite protests in city and countryside, the Chinese government continues to privatize and liberalize its economy, and the Chinese Communist Party still punishes all forms of organized political opposition.

Negative Campaigning: An Analysis of U.S. Senate Elections. By Richard R. Lau and Gerald M. Pomper. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 177p. $26.95.

If you think that negative campaigning has come to dominate the American electoral landscape, depresses voter turnout, is particularly effective in winning votes, and/or is detrimental to democracy, this book is a must read. Richard Lau and Gerald Pomper investigate a series of questions intended to illuminate these concerns. They utilize an extensive data set based on U.S. Senate elections from 1992 through 2002. Their findings are often quite startling. Negative campaigning does not appear to have the deleterious effects conventional wisdom would suggest.

The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal. By Dennis C. Galvan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 331p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Oral history among the Serer ethnic group in western Senegal suggests that a heroic itinerant ancestor founded the community in a parcel of land he cleared by setting fire to the brush and the forest. This original fire is the source of the authority over claims to control and use the land that became institutionalized in the inheritable office now widely known by the title of laman (the “master of fire”). With the commodification of the economy under colonial rule, the introduction of a new land tenure system, and the creation of elected rural councils for local management of land tenure by the postcolonial government, the state has replaced the lamans as the master of fire. This history provides the fascinating title and the substantive focus of Dennis Galvan's interesting book that addresses theoretically important and empirically relevant issues concerning the relative impact of structure and agency on the choice of new institutions, the resulting impact of embedded institutions on social and economic development, and, more broadly, the relationship among institutions, culture, and development.

Making Sense of Governance: Empirical Evidence from 16 Developing Countries. By Goran Hyden, Julius Court, and Kenneth Mease. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 262p. $55.00.

This is an unusual and intriguing book. It is both erudite and exploratory (as the authors acknowledge), brilliant in conception, and problematic in execution. It is based on the results of the World Governance Survey (WGS) of “well-informed people” (WIPs), such as high-ranking civil servants, long-standing parliamentarians, businesspeople, academics, and so on. At least 35 WIPs were surveyed in each of the 16 developing countries in the study. No one can doubt the importance of the topic that Goran Hyden, Julius Court, and Kenneth Mease address, particularly given the increasing prominence that it occupies in development theory and practice. The authors define governance as “the rules that regulate the public realm” (p. 16). They rightly seek to give badly needed analytical depth to its study.

Contesting the Iron Fist: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile. By Claudio A. Fuentes. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p. $75.00.

Police violence has become an all too common reality in Latin America. Most scholars have chalked up the problem to authoritarian legacies, ones inherited from colonialism, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century caudillo's or more recently from military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these studies fail to explain why police violence can vary so widely from country to country or from one time period to another, nor can they account for genuine reform efforts. Fortunately, Claudio Fuentes's book departs from these formulas and offers a more plausible theory of police abuse in Latin America.

Congressional Communication: Content and Consequences. By Daniel Lipinski. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 160p. $29.95.

For a decade, scholars have debated the impact of rising partisanship on the internal workings of the Congress. With the publication of Daniel Lipinski's analysis of House members' communications to their constituents, it appears that they also need to consider the effects of party conflict on representation at home. Using newsletters and targeted mailings from 1991 to 1995, as well as surveys and interviews with House members and their staffs, Lipinski assesses the communication strategies of a sample of 100 lawmakers and arrives at conclusions that challenge some long-standing views about the interaction of House members and their constituents.

The Future of Money. By Benjamin J. Cohen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 312p. $29.95.

Benjamin Cohen has produced yet another excellent volume on the political economy of international monetary affairs, this time with a worthy successor to his previous opus, The Geography of Money (1998). Like most of Cohen's scholarship, The Future of Money displays the author's remarkable facility with the vast breadth of issues, theories, puzzles, and esoterica associated with monetary matters, as well as a confident command of monetary policy and history. Future is perhaps less ambitious than Geography, but it is tight, well argued, and not wanting for important claims.