The last decade has seen a contentious dialogue between quantitative and qualitative scholars over the nature of political science methodology. Even so, there has often been a consensus that quantitative and qualitative research share a “unified logic of inference;” that the differences between these “traditions are only stylistic and are methodologically and substantively unimportant.” All of the books under review here share these convictions. Yet the most remarkable feature of these works taken as a whole —and the focus of this review essay—is the more capacious view of the scientific enterprise on display. John Gerring's Social Science Methodology, David Collier and Henry Brady's Rethinking Social Inquiry, and Charles Ragin's Fuzzy-Set Social Science all focus on aspects of the scientific process beyond the testing of hypotheses—science being “a systematic, rigorous, evidence-based, generalizing, nonsubjective, and cumulative” way of discovering the truth about the world (Gerring, p. xv). If science is the systematic gathering of knowledge, testing hypotheses—the central concern of statistical inference—is an important part of this. But it is only one part. Before we can turn to testing hypotheses, we must be clear about concepts, theories, and cases. And here both Barbara Geddes's Paradigms and Sand Castles and the Elmans' Bridges and Boundaries complement the other works by attending closely to these issues even when the larger goal remains the testing of theory.George Thomas is assistant professor of political science at Williams College ([email protected]). The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics, Mark Blyth, Brian Taylor, and, especially, Craig Thomas for helpful comments.

Howard Dean's presidential bid was notable for many things, including the mixed reaction it drew from political scientists. Many scholars found Dean's ultimate failure predictable. Longstanding political science wisdom suggests several explanations for Dean's defeat: the central issue of electability, which seemed to weigh heavily against his campaign; the fact that primary voters are more moderate than party activists; the well-documented difficulty of regaining lost momentum. Less systematic factors—such as numerous verbal gaffes and one infamous scream—surely contributed as well.Matthew Hindman is an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University ([email protected]). This research was supported by the National Center for Digital Government, with funding from the National Science Foundation under grant no. 0131923. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, Larry Bartels, Chris Karpowitz, Gabriel Lenz, David Lazer, Alan Abramowitz, James McCann, and the three anonymous reviewers for their contributions.

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.

Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity. By Kathleen R. Arnold. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 212p. $40.00.

This study focuses on the problem of homelessness, though it is not an empirical study designed to propose particular policies to tackle the plight of the homeless and the dislocation of immigrants. The issue of homelessness is used to illustrate some deep-seated difficulties in the modern concept of citizenship and the political identity offered by the contemporary nation-state. The core argument of the book is that modern citizenship rests on a two-fold criterion of work and national identity. Citizens are those who contribute productively through their work and thus can claim to be economically independent. Citizenship is also dependent on membership of a national community. The ideal citizen thus has a home, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense: Such citizens are economically independent through their work, and have a home in a more abstract sense of being part of a territorially based nation-state.

Time for a true confession: I'm skeptical of predictions in social and political life. Talk of causal generalizations and Hempel's covering laws strikes me as science fiction and fantasy in drag; talk of the unfolding of the immanent logic of modernity makes me dyspeptic. I usually think that structural considerations are context, not cause, and that weird combinations of stray contingencies explain what happens. Worse, now I'm called on to predict how political theorists will be discussing democracy ten years hence. Images of herding cats and Brownian motion come to mind. Nonetheless, duty calls. I dust off my crystal ball and discover it has three channels.Don Herzog teaches law and political theory at the University of Michigan ([email protected]).

The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties of Democratic Rule. By Roger M. Barrus, John H. Eastby, Joseph H. Lane, Jr., David E. Marion, and James F. Pontuso. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 174p. $70.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

In this short but provocative book, the authors argue that Americans' interest over the last century in expanding democratic responsiveness to the popular will has resulted in a diminution of representative institutions. Only the latter can refine and enlarge public opinion and provide the safeguards that are the essence of constitutionalism. The triumph of democracy is not inevitable. We are in danger of forgetting, the authors suggest, “its intrinsic and characteristic deficiencies, which must be counteracted if it is to function properly” (p. 7). In the first four chapters, Roger Barrus and his coauthors concentrate on American statesmen whose writings and actions played crucial roles in shaping the current context.

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. By Danielle S. Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 254p. $25.00 cloth.

It may seem odd, given its title, but this is a book about friendship. The central problem of American democracy, according to Danielle Allen, is a lack of trust among citizens. For democracy to be stable, its citizens must feel confident that the obligations and opportunities of society are shared equitably. Yet majority rule is a breeding ground for distrust, particularly in a polity marked by race. Without trust, there is nothing to bind the minority and the majority together. The task of this book is to find ways for citizens to trust one another in these unsettled times. Doing so, Allen argues, requires developing habits of political friendship. The challenge of democratic politics, ironically, is to turn strangers into friends.

Never in America … has there been a matter requiring more good judgment or more vigilance, or demanding a clearer and more thorough examination.” José Martí's observation on the first effort by the United States to unite both Americas at the Pan-American Congress in 1889 is relevant again today. Efforts to unite the two hemispheres are underway with the proposal to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas and the flurry of preliminary bilateral and regional trade agreements that the Bush Administration has been pushing in Latin America. It appears that Latin American leaders have taken the quote to heart—most trade negotiations now focus on forming a united regional front. The aim of “regionalization” is to unite countries in Latin America into small groups prior to their integration into a larger, hemisphere-wide trade bloc.Luisa Angrisani was educated at Fordham University, where she completed a master's degree in international political economy and development, specializing in Latin America. She joined the Economist Intelligence Unit and is presently a regional editor, assessing political, economic, and financial conditions in Latin America ([email protected]). She has also written several articles, most recently for the National Interest.

While it is hard to predict where the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be in ten years, one thing is certain: a peaceful reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, based on a two-state solution that guarantees Palestinians and Israelis territorial integrity and security, would have a positive impact on economic and democratic developments in the Arab world. These developments, however, will not occur easily; such transitions are often chaotic, shocking, and painful.Amaney Jamal is assistant professor of politics at Princeton University ([email protected]).

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. By Seyla Benhabib. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Between 1910 and 2000, the world's population more than tripled, from 1.6 to 5.3 billion. The number of persons who live as migrants in countries other than those in which they were born increased nearly sixfold, from 33 million to 175 million, and more than half of this increase has occurred since 1965. Almost 20 million of these are refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons. In her book, Seyla Benhabib grapples with both the political and moral implications of this rapid increase in transnational migration, arguing that the central principles that shape our thinking about political membership and state sovereignty are in tension, if not outright contradiction, with one another. “From a philosophical point of view,” she writes, “transnational migrations bring to the fore the constitutive dilemma at the heart of liberal democracies: between sovereign self-determination claims on the one hand and adherence to universal human rights principles on the other” (p. 2). She argues for an internal reconstruction of both, underscoring the significance of membership in bounded communities, while at the same time promoting the cultivation of democratic loyalties that exceed the national state, supporting political participation on the part of citizens and noncitizen residents alike.

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws. By Randall Baldwin Clark. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 192p. $55.00.

A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws. By Albert Keith Whitaker. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 254p. $39.00.

Plato's Laws, his longest and most comprehensive work on politics, is a conversation about the purposes and limits of legislation among three old men: an Athenian Stranger, Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. The three speak while ascending to the cave-shrine of Zeus where Kleinias hopes to receive the blessing of the god for his appointed task of drawing up a law code to govern a new colony. Until recently, the Laws was very little read, and there is still relatively little useful secondary literature on it, especially when compared to the ocean of scholarly treatments available on the far better known Republic.

In 1983 Martin Shapiro worried that the “new jurisprudence of values” being promoted by the new generation of public law scholars in political science would “serve as a cover for slipping back into playing ‘little law professor’ for undergraduates.” Proponents of the “jurisprudence of values” in political science, who engaged in constitutional theorizing about individual rights and the structure of governing institutions, would “writ[e] conventional case law doctrine” that “contain[ed] no distinctive political analysis.” Worse, the fruits of the behavioral revolution might rot should normative concerns take center stage in public law inquiry. Rather than further integrate the study of courts into mainstream political science, public law scholars would spend their time telling Supreme Court justices how to do their jobs. Shapiro predicted, “[P]olitical scientists trained in the empirically oriented ‘American politics’ field will be shoved to the edges of ‘public law,’ and political jurisprudence will be converted to ‘legal and political theory.’” Abandoning American constitutionalism was the best antidote for the threat a jurisprudence of values presented to the social science study of law and courts. Students of the judicial process, Shapiro declared in 1989, should explore “any public law other than constitutional law, any court other than the Supreme Court, any public lawmaker other than the judge, and any country other than the United States.”Mark A. Graber is a professor of government at the University of Maryland, College Park and a professor of law at the University of Maryland School of Law ([email protected]). He is the author of Transforming Free Speech, Rethinking Abortion, and Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. The author thanks Rogers Smith, Howard Gillman, Keith Whittington, Ran Hirschl, Jennifer Hochschild and several (not-so) anonymous reviewers from their advice and encouragement. Apologies to the numerous talented young students of public law whose fine works were omitted to conserve space.

Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS. By Michele Tracy Berger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 248p. $32.50.

How do women who face the multiple stigmas associated with drug use, sex work, and HIV-positive status engage as political actors in the wider environment that shapes their lives? This question is at the heart of Workable Sisterhood. Michele Tracy Berger offers one of the first studies of the development of critical consciousness and political participation of women of color who are HIV positive. All of the women she interviewed for her study have also struggled with drug abuse and engaged in sex work, and all have found a way to translate their experiences into a range of political actions designed to empower themselves and other women who face similar challenges. These activities include contesting the stigma associated with HIV-positive status, working “face-to-face” with other HIV-positive women, designing events and cultural projects to educate the wider community about HIV and about those living with HIV and AIDS, and advocating for social and economic changes that would help improve the lives of HIV-positive people (p. 12).

In the next ten years, who will win and who will lose from globalization? In thinking about this question, I avoid speculating on the broad impact of globalization on economic outcomes. Instead, I limit my treatment to the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on developed and developing countries, especially how competition to attract firms affects domestic politics and national economies.Nathan Jensen ([email protected]) is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The author thanks Sophie Fortin, Geoff Garrett, Quan Li, René Lindstädt, Bill Lowry, Guillermo Rosas, Andy Sobel, and Jana von Stein for their comments and suggestions.

Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity. By Michael Rabinder James. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 240p. $35.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Michael Rabinder James addresses one of the most pressing problems facing liberal democracies: how to deal fairly and justly with group conflict and identity-based political claims. Although a normative theorist at heart, James understands the problem as both a question of stability and of justice. Prudence can tell us that reducing antipathy and mistrust between groups is a good thing, but in reducing tensions between groups, we also need to be sensitive to the legitimate claims and calls for justice on behalf of groups. His normative approach is refreshingly pragmatic and empirically well informed. But as mentioned, he is at heart a normative theorist, and at the heart of this book is a normative concept of deliberation that focuses on the way dialogue and conversation between groups can promote mutual understanding, reduce tension, enhance stability, and address deep-seated justice claims.

Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World. Edited by Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 268p. $70.00.

Since the fall of the Soviet Bloc regimes, it has become accepted wisdom that the market system has triumphed—that relying on the free, independent exchange between economic actors is a far superior way of allocating resources than attempting to “plan” from above. At a general level, this accepted wisdom is hard to dispute. Yet, like all such propositions, its heuristic usefulness cuts two ways: Embracing it wholesale makes for an easy bet; it also, however, encourages one to overlook a more complex and ambiguous reality that lurks beneath the surface. We might agree, for example, that markets confer myriad economic and political advantages. What we might less readily agree on, however, is what, precisely, we mean by “markets.” As the essays in Markets in Historical Contexts make clear, if we mean institutions that are “not encumbered by geography, weight, unequal access to information, government regulation, or particularistic agendas” (p. 226) (not to mention cultural context), then we will quickly find ourselves running afoul of social science's ultimate limit: reality.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 224p. $42.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Are groups necessarily destructive? This question is the focus of Cynthia Burack's new book. To address it, she constructs a conversation among psychoanalytic political theorists, psychoanalytic group theorists, and black feminist theorists. As the structure of the book makes clear, Burack hopes to broaden her audience to readers unfamiliar with any or all of these discourses. She intends to convince students of politics and feminists (particularly black feminists) that psychoanalytic theory can contribute much to understanding the dynamics of that ubiquitous feature of political life, groups. Furthermore, she wants to bridge the disciplinary gap between those who study groups and those who engage in discourse analysis. Discourse analysts are presently primarily located in humanities and cultural studies, and when they employ psychoanalytic thinking, it tends to be the Lacanian strand. Burack argues for a different tack, psychoanalytic object relations theory, particularly as articulated by Wilfred Bion, D. W. Winnicott, and Melanie Klein.

Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society. By Sung Ho Kim. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 224p. $60.00.

The idea that a healthy and vibrant civil society provides an essential basis for democratic polities has become a mainstay of contemporary political theory. The so-called civil society argument has been put forward as transcending a rather blunt dichotomy between liberal individualism and Marxian collectivism. Current interest in this area engages the intersection between what Ernest Gellner referred to as the “modal” self of the modern age, and the neo-Tocquevillian concern with the institutional and character-forming elements of associational life. Fitting Max Weber—typically viewed as either founding father of sociology, nationalist apologist, or aristocratic liberal—within these positions is an engaging project that requires a keener awareness of the overall subtlety of his thinking than normally presented, as Sung Ho Kim recognizes (p. 17). Reconciling Weber's concern for the ethical presuppositions of action with his understanding of the difficulties of maintaining a sense of individuality in an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic world suggests a very particular vision of civil society. It is a sphere that ties together a concern with “statecraft,” on the one hand, and “soulcraft,” on the other, both in terms of the particular concerns of legitimate political rule, but also in terms of the requirements of personality more generally.

Isaiah Berlin: Liberty, Pluralism, and Liberalism. By George Crowder. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 256p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The conventional recent history of Anglophone normative political philosophy, which credits John Rawls's publication of A Theory of Justice (1971) with its rebirth, is unfair to those important figures who came before Rawls—chiefly Karl Popper, Michael Oakeshott, F.A. Hayek, and—the subject of this critical introduction—Isaiah Berlin. There is a further irony in that what can be clearly identified as the major theme of Berlin's lifework—moral pluralism—also dominates the late writings of John Rawls and those influenced by him. Indeed, it is arguable that the intense interest displayed in Berlin's account of pluralism owes much to the importance of this topic in contemporary moral and political philosophy. To some extent, even the Berlin of the classic and influential lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty”—which has for long constituted the inescapable starting point for any serious analysis of this ideal—is overshadowed by the Berlin who insists that the goods human beings pursue are inescapably plural, conflicting, and incommensurable.

Will China's expected emergence as the predominant state in East Asia result in hierarchy or balancing? At least three major bodies of literature predict that a rising China will be destabilizing. Realpolitik pessimists see China's rise as inherently so. John Mearsheimer writes that if China threatened to dominate the entire region, “It would be a far more dangerous place than it is now … Engagement policies and the like would not dull China's appetite for power.” Power transition theorists also see rapidly rising power as a likely cause of conflict. Robert Powell writes that, “A rapidly shifting distribution of power combined with the states' inability to commit to an agreement can lead to war.” Finally, those who focus on signaling emphasize that an authoritarian state has more difficulty in making credible statements about its intentions than a democratic state.David C. Kang is associate professor of government at Dartmouth College ([email protected]).