Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945. By Mark N. Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

According to Mark Franklin, “As the vexing questions of political science can be regarded as puzzles, the particular topic of voter turnout could be called the ‘grand enchilada’ of puzzles of political science…. [A]lmost everything about voter turnout is puzzling, from the question of why anyone bothers to vote at all to the question of why certain variables appear to explain voter turnout in some circumstances but not in others.” He makes this bold but true statement in the preface (p. xi) of his comparative study of turnout in more than 20 established democracies since World War II. Voter turnout is one of the more frequently studied topics in political science, but the results of all these scholarly efforts remain rather poor and unsatisfactory. We still know distressingly little about why some people vote and others do not, why turnout is much higher in some countries than in others, and why in so many countries there seems to be a steady and irrevocable decline in turnout in national elections.

The Limits of Protectionism: Building Coalitions for Free Trade. By Michael Lusztig. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2004. 288p. $27.95.

This is an ambitious and useful book that takes the reader through eight cases of governments that tried, with mixed results, to guide their countries from protectionism to free trade. A successful strategy requires the government to make allies of the industries that can transform themselves and survive in a more competitive environment (“flexible rent-seekers”) and quickly to kill the industries that cannot (“inflexible rent-seekers”). Michael Lusztig adopts from the classic public choice literature the term rent-seekers, a group that seeks to effect a zero sum transfer from others to itself, usually resulting in a negative sum game for society, by the amount of the transaction costs necessary to effect the transfer.

Judicial Review and Bureaucratic Impact: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Marc Hertogh and Simon Halliday. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 328p. $90.00 cloth, $39.99 paper.

The impact of judicial decisions on bureaucracy is poorly understood. Some claim that court judgments have little or no effect. In contrast, others worry that judges will usurp the policymaking role of the political branches and override the expertise and experience of civil servants. As this thoughtful and wide-ranging collection of papers demonstrates, both claims are exaggerated.

South Asia's Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan, and China. Edited by Lowell Dittmer. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004. 296p. $69.95 cloth, $28.95 paper.

India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status. By Baldev Raj Nayar and T. V. Paul. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 302p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

The 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan caught the attention of international relations theorists as never before. While the earlier analyses of South Asia came primarily from those working on nonproliferation issues and regional conflict-prevention perspectives, the advent of overt nuclear weapon status of India and Pakistan presented IR scholars with the opportunity to explore a range of hypotheses about new nuclear powers. Was South Asia going to be able to take advantage of its backwardness/late entry into the deterrence game and learn from the considerable research and experience of the two superpowers during the Cold War? Were India and Pakistan as rational as the United States and the Soviet Union (if not more), and could they manage their rivalry without resorting to nuclear exchange? Will their overt nuclear weapons capabilities make India and Pakistan more careful in their responses to each other's provocative moves? Is a rivalry based in political ideology (like the U.S.-USSR one) more susceptible to rational decision making than a rivalry based in religious ideology (supposedly the primary basis of the India-Pakistan dispute)? A related set of questions raised by the tests focused primarily on the reasons/motivations behind Indian nuclear tests and their impact on the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

Becoming Europe: Immigration, Integration, and the Welfare State. By Patrick Ireland. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2004. 288p. $27.95.

Patrick Ireland begins this detailed and clearly presented discussion about belonging in relation to patterns of European Union migration by raising a critical issue with the concept of ethnicity, defined as a “collective group consciousness that imparts a sense of belonging derived from membership in a community bound putatively by common descent and culture” (pp. 2–3). Ireland's study finds that belonging is context specific, rather than derived from common descent. This finding implies that there is by definition no readily available general policy applicable to one type of immigrants, say, Turks or Moroccans across all EU member states. Instead, each country's possibilities for integration differ. To Ireland, ethnicity “is not so much a category as a dynamic, elastic entity. Its value as a social, economic, and political resource varies; the appraisal depends considerably on institutions and policies.” (pp. 4–5).

Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations. By Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 400p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Most scholars work within established paradigms. Few have the temerity to challenge them—and fewer still succeed in causing fundamental reconsideration. Peter Feaver has accomplished the latter task. He has taken on the dominant long-standing theoretical framework for American civil–military relations and, in the process, provided a more accurate view of them in the early twenty-first century.

Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights. By Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. New York: Zed Books, 2003. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

In her book, Rosalind Petchesky sets herself the ambitious task of analyzing the development and impact of transnational movements for women's health in the last two decades of the twentieth century. She examines them not only in relation to the changing concepts of human rights and major United Nations conferences, but within the broader political and economic context of the spread of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalisms, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and militarism. Originally commissioned by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development for a five-year review of the World Summit for Social Development, the book assumes a fair degree of sophistication in regard to transnational politics although the text is punctuated by short boxes that give readers a useful introduction to key policy developments.

Spatializing International Politics: Analyzing Activism on the Internet. By Jayne Rogers. New York: Routledge, 2003. 184p. $96.95.

Recent anxiety about variable electoral turnout, falling party membership, and opinion polls depicting the disaffection of young people with politics has led some commentators to suggest that democratic politics in many countries is in crisis. While these concerns may reflect a significant dissatisfaction among citizens with their politicians and representative institutions, it may however be far too early to conclude that people have ceased to be interested in participating in the political arena.

Remapping Global Politics: History's Revenge and Future Shock. By Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 380p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

This latest book in Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach's decades-long research collaboration is exceptionally ambitious. Starting from the controversial claim that current globalizing processes are decreasing states' capacity, legitimacy, and authority while increasing those of many of the other collectivities that populate global politics (p. 312), the authors argue that it is time to redraw “our mental maps of global politics” (p. xi). They set out to do so, proposing to “explain the forces shaping change” along the way (p. xi). Of course to either remap global politics or explain the forces that shape change is a formidable task. It is thus impressive that they have managed to argue their case as successfully as they have, especially in such a lively and often delightfully irreverent way.

Before Norms: Institutions and Civic Culture. By Robert W. Jackman and Ross A. Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 262p. $70.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

With this volume, Robert Jackman and Ross Miller pursue a twofold ambition. First, they want to demonstrate that most of the research on political culture and the impact of values on political behavior can be questioned, both on theoretical as on methodological grounds. Second, they want to demonstrate that their theoretical model, based on the assumption that actors optimize their behavior within durable institutional restraints, is better able to explain what people do with regard to politics.

The Rules of Federalism: Institutions and Regulatory Politics in the EU and Beyond. By Daniel Kelemen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 256p. $49.95.

In this engaging, clearly written volume, Daniel Kelemen synthesizes and elaborates a theoretical model that contributes to several literatures. As a study of the European Union, it stands at the logical endpoint of a growing trend toward the application of analytical tools drawn from conventional comparative politics. As an account of governmental institutions, the broad analytic narrative breaks new ground in sorting out the consequences of federalism. As an analysis of public policy, especially environmental policy, the book offers a new argument about the institutional sources of regulatory politics.

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. By V. P. Gagnon, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 217p. $35.00

Publications focusing on Yugoslavia's collapse and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo abound. One of the key category errors committed in much of this work—and especially in the mountains of journalistic output throughout the 1990s—has been to classify Yugoslavia's wars merely as wars of rival ethnicities and nationalisms, if not ancient hatreds. Conventional wisdom has it that Yugoslavia's wars in the 1990s were typical “Balkan” wars emanating from primordial nationalisms, heavily laden with historical baggage and rich in potent myth and symbols. The easiest way to explain Yugoslavia's violent disintegration in the late twentieth century was to relapse into cliché-ridden accounts of base, primeval ethnic rivalries that hitherto had been contained by a combination of the restraints imposed by Tito's brand of communism and the exigencies of a polarized Cold War international system in which Yugoslavia inhabited a very particular space.

The EU, NATO, and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric. By Frank Schimmelfennig. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 338p. $80.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

At the European Union meeting in December 2004, one of the topics for discussion was Turkey's accession. Although it appears that negotiations regarding this topic and the specific requirements regarding membership (e.g., Turkey's recognition of Cyprus) will continue for the next few years, this time it also appeared that EU member states were willing to engage in serious discussion about this issue. For Turkey, this has been a long time in coming; it initially applied for membership in 1987 and has been rebuffed each time since then. Although a member of NATO since 1951—the only Muslim member-state of the alliance—Turkey has been kept at a distance by the EU for a number of reasons. Justified largely on economic grounds, an underlying issue clearly has been whether the countries of first Western and now Eastern Europe really want to admit a country that is so “different.” In other words, what values and perspectives, as well as political and economic structure, are important for a country to really become a member of “the community”? The decision calculus regarding the admission of new states to both NATO and the EU are at the heart of this monograph by Frank Schimmelfennig, and the arguments he puts forth are especially germane now as the EU considers Turkey's membership and as NATO ponders its own future in light of the divisions caused by the war in Iraq.

Models, Numbers and Cases: Methods for Studying International Relations. Edited by Detlef F. Sprinz and Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 424p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This volume, which originated in conversations among the editors at the 1997 meeting of the International Studies Association, is an attempt to provide an introductory handbook covering three categories of research methods now widely used in the study of international relations: case studies, statistical data analyses, and formal models. Thirteen chapters discuss the application of these methods to studies of international political economy, international environmental politics, and international security; an introduction and conclusion complete the volume.

Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961–1974: From “Red Menace” to “Tacit Ally.” By Evelyn Goh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 316p. $75.00.

The constructivist approach to the study of international relations seems to have become popular today. Evelyn Goh's book uses the constructivist approach to study one of the most dramatic events in the history of international relations in the twentieth century: Richard Nixon's rapprochement with China. The traditional orthodox interpretation of Sino-American relations views bilateral relations in the 1960s as an extension of hostility and antagonism that started in the early 1950s; Nixon's dramatic departure in the early 1970s resulted from his realistic calculation of American strategic interests and the assistance China might provide in counterbalancing the increasing Soviet threat. This book analyzes the Sino-American rapprochement from a different angle. By identifying and tracing, throughout the 1960s within the U.S. government, the changing perception of China and the idea of a new China policy associated with the rapprochement, Goh tries to answer the question of how the rapprochement could have been achieved, rather than why it happened in 1972.

Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders. By Gallya Lahav. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 334p. $75.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

In this book, Gallya Lahav offers a nuanced account of the nascent and dynamic Europeanization of migration policy. Moving beyond scholarship that narrowly casts migration as a contest between supranational and domestic constraints, Lahav depicts the prospects for collective European migration policymaking as a product of “emergent consensual attitudes on restrictive policies, among elites and mass publics alike” (p. 9). By “bringing attitudes back in,” her treatment offers a welcome complement to intergovernmentalist and neofunctionalist accounts of migration policy and reminds readers that as policymakers grapple with the domestic and international challenges of contemporary immigration, cooperation may be of a negative or restrictive sort.

Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. By Allen D. Hertzke. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 440p. $27.95.

Contemporary international relations scholarship has generally disregarded the role of religion in global politics. The two dominant IR paradigms—neorealism and neoliberalism—tend to neglect religion altogether, assuming that religious beliefs and institutions are an impediment to world order. To a significant degree, the skepticism about religion is rooted in the prevailing Western assumption that science and reason will make religion unnecessary in modern life. However, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the world has not become more secular. Rather, religion has become more prominent in society, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As a result, the leading secular IR paradigms have failed to take into account the religious dimension in international affairs.

Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity: Diversity and Drift. Edited by Martin A. Levin and Martin Shapiro. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 344p. $29.95 paper.

In an age when we are aware of our increasing global connections with one another, it is only fitting that we should observe the larger similarities that we may share with other nations in the realm of policymaking. In this book, editors Martin A. Levin and Martin Shapiro argue that policymakers on both the conservative and liberal side of the spectrum are so concerned about courting undecided voters who take a “middle of the road” stance that they often compromise bold or innovative policy initiatives in the name of moderation to attract these neutral voters. To complicate matters, most governments are facing austere conditions—which suggests that while demographic and political forces shape policymaking, economic variables play a pivotal role as well. The end result of this complex scenario is that policymakers are more likely to be conformists than trailblazers.

Collective Preventive Diplomacy: A Study in International Conflict Management. By Barry H. Steiner. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 255p. $50.00.

In recent years, international scholars and policymakers have focused considerable attention on the moral and political challenges of collective action by major states to defuse ethnic conflict within smaller states. Among the most important recent studies examining these issues are the United Nations General Assembly Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) and the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (2001). Barry H. Steiner's study of collective efforts to prevent and resolve conflict is a welcome contribution to this literature. Steiner examines how and why major states join together for preventive diplomacy purposes. He draws from eight cases, ranging from the Greek revolution of the 1820s to the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, and employs Alexander George's method of focused, structured comparison to distill lessons about the nature of great-power collective action.

International Relations and the Problem of Difference. By Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney. New York: Routledge, 2004. 276p. $80.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Can scholars of international relations dig themselves out from under the weight of several hundred years of world history and their own analytic baggage and remake themselves? This book asks for precisely this, delivering an important message for the discipline. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's opening premise is that IR, in spite of what one might logically expect, has always in fact been stymied and wrong-footed by the “problem of difference.” Far from being able to understand and deal sensitively with diversity and the other, the practices and discipline of IR have squashed it—internally the state has become an engine of homogenization, while externally international society is a hostile realm of danger and hierarchy, in which forces of an “empire of uniformity” operate to stigmatize difference and tame it. Instead of embracing and theorizing difference, IR is associated from the time of early modern Europe with the crippling dual “legacy of colonialism and religious cleansing” (p. viii). The authors are advocates instead of “heterology,” of the study of IR as a “study of differences” in which dominant Western perspectives and leaders are not afraid to be challenged and changed by encounters with diversity and the other, in which such encounters are open questions.