The Constraint of Race: The Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America. By Linda Faye Williams. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 440p. $35.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Linda Faye Williams's book seeks to identify “how, when and why American social policy became fused with the politics of race” and what that has meant for the development and evolution of the welfare state in the United States. The author's central argument is that the welfare state was “grafted onto preexisting conditions of race relations,” and the long-term consequence of this grafting is that even today, the organization of social policy in the United States continues to reproduce advantages for whites and disadvantages for many people of color. Further, as social welfare policy institutionalizes white advantage, this in turn tends to block movement in the direction of more universalistic social policy (p. 14). Williams supports this contention by revisiting the political history of social welfare policy, from just after the Civil War up to the Clinton administration's efforts at welfare “reform” in 1996.

Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. Edited by Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 337p. $55.00.

This edited volume of eleven chapters draws from sources as diverse as Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Christine de Pizan, and John Stuart Mill. On the one hand, the volume is intended as a selective but wide-ranging study of the history of the theory and practice of rhetoric. As the editors Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer stress in the Introduction, the essays are “committed to a historical analysis of their subject matter” (p. 20). But the volume is much more than an exercise in historical analysis or an intellectual history of theoretical reflections on rhetoric. The essays are drawn together into a genuine whole by an argument that runs throughout the book.

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. By Lee Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 470p. $90.00.

This is a study of the origins and development of Whig political thought in England and America. James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke all wrote during the Exclusion Crisis in England that ended in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Their common enemy was divine right absolutism and its chief spokesman, Sir Robert Filmer. Their common starting point was the premise of man's “natural liberty” as requiring political orders to be grounded in some form of consent creating constitutional limitations on power and justifying resistance to tyranny. The core of the study is an analysis of Tyrrell's Patriarcha, Non Monarcha, Sidney's Discourse Concerning Government, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Lee Ward asks us to “imagine [these] foundational works … to be intellectual and philosophical genetic markers placed in the bloodstream of the tradition” of Whig political and constitutional thought in England and America (p. 325).

Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America. By George C. Edwards III. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. 224p. $26.00.

George Edwards has filled the breech created by the recent death of Lawrence Longley as a powerful voice within political science opposing the electoral college. In the foreword, Longley's longtime associate, Neal Peirce, notes that one of the great puzzles of the 2000 presidential election was that it failed to prompt a massive public outcry against the system that elevated George W. Bush to the presidency, despite Al Gore's 539,893 positive margin in popular votes. Another great puzzle is the lack of any consensus among political scientists on the issue, as described in Choosing a President (2002), edited by Burdett Loomis and myself.

Identity in Democracy. By Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 264p. $35.00 cloth, $ 17.95 paper.

What ought to be the role of identity groups in the politics of a just democratic society? In her book, Amy Gutmann sets out to explore this question. She does not offer a definitive answer to it; however, she does offer evaluative criteria by which we may decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether or not the political interventions of organized identity groups are beneficial to a democratic society such as she presumes the United States to be. When, Gutmann asks (p. 5), may the politics of organized identity groups contribute to a society structured on what she identifies as the three basic principles of democratic justice: civic equality (equal standing as a citizen), liberty, and opportunity? Conversely, when are they inimical to such principles?

America's Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception. By Wayne Baker. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. 312p. $35.00

Is the United States losing its moral compass? Are Americans today less committed than in the past to traditional values? Is the country becoming ever more deeply divided between traditionalists and secularists?

On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000. By Julian E. Zelizer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 376p. $30.00.

Julian Zelizer's book joins a number of others that have been taking up the issue of congressional reform. Recent books by political scientists E. Scott Adler (Why Congressional Reforms Fail, 2002), Nelson Polsby (How Congress Evolves, 2003), and Eric Schickler (Disjointed Pluralism, 2001) are among a growing list that seeks to explain the success or failure of congressional reforms during the twentieth century. One of the interesting aspects of these books is that they are authored by mostly younger scholars who are reassessing, and sometimes seriously challenging, a genre of scholarship that was pioneered during the seventies by such scholars as Lawrence Dodd, Bruce Oppenheimer, Barbara Sinclair, and James Thurber, to name a few, many of whom were American Political Science Association Congressional Fellows working in Congress during the period of substantial congressional reform in the 1970s.

Passing the Buck: Congress, the Budget, and Deficits. By Jasmine Farrier. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 296p. $40.00.

Has Congress, in recent years, repeatedly transferred its budgetary powers to the president in response to huge deficits and other fiscal challenges? Jasmine Farrier argues forcefully that it has. Looking at a number of case studies of congressional budget reform since 1974, she claims that Congress has delegated significant constitutional authority to the executive branch. In particular, she examines the legislative histories of the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act, the 1985 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act (Gramm-Rudman-Hollings), the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, and the 1996 Line-Item Veto Act to make her case. Torn between constituent demands for federal funds and their obligation to make responsible national budget policy, Farrier concludes, members have attacked their own branch, giving away power, begging to “stop us before we spend again.”

Doing the Right Thing: Collective Action and Procedural Choice in the New Legislative Process. By Lawrence Becker. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005. 164p. $39.95.

Lawrence Becker remarks that “it is no wonder that the American Congress is among the most reviled of American institutions,” and casts partial blame on political scientists who depict Congress as “gridlocked, impotent, overly influenced by special interests, and even corrupt (p. ix).” Becker has a point, and his investigation of several issue areas (base closings, free trade, nuclear waste disposal, and tax reform) where Congress has enacted legislation that “imposes direct costs on localities or particular economic sectors in favor of some general diffuse benefit such as deficit reduction” is refreshing (p. 1). The book is a nice complement to graduate-level readings that typically emphasize the particularistic, local emphasis of congressional policymaking. The well-written case studies and Becker's propositions concerning when such change is most likely to occur and how, though not ironclad, provide plenty of food for thought and discussion.

Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. By Archon Fung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 336p. $39.50.

The United States harbors the hope that participation can improve policy. In January 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton discussed with General William Sherman how to resettle tens of thousands of freed people on the abandoned plantations of the Sea Islands, near Savannah. They included 20 African American religious and civic leaders in their deliberations that produced the short-lived 40-acres policy. Stanton suggested that the process of this decision, as well as its content, would “electrify the nation.” David Lilienthal suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a brand new method of government in the manner in which it included the “grass roots” in the process of electrification. The War on Poverty brought with it an emphasis on maximum feasible participation that Daniel Moynihan explained was part third rail and part poorly devised policy.

Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics. By Susan J. Hekman. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 159p. $35.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

The Politics of Identity: Liberal Political Theory and the Dilemmas of Difference. By Michael Kenny. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 212p. $59.95 cloth, $27.95 paper.

The debate about multiculturalism takes many forms, and can focus on cultural domination, legal recognition of difference, and particular policy construction. But in these two volumes it pertains to liberal political theory and identity politics. Both are concerned with the challenges evident in the inability of some conceptions of liberalism to respond to the claims of the political relevance of categories of identity. Both are well grounded in current literature exploring the limitations and possibilities of liberalism. Both focus more on the political theory than on the political reality. But in the end, they champion different sides—Susan J. Hekman reconceptualizes and rehabilitates identity politics, and Michael Kenny reframes and reinvigorates liberalism. Although their conclusions are not incompatible, they are aimed at different audiences. Were the authors sharing a stage, they might largely talk past each other.

Transnational Politics of the Environment: The European Union and Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe. By Liliana Andonova. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. 224p. $57.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

After the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s, the 10 new emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) all sought to accede to the European Union. But to join the EU, applicant countries had first to adopt the vast array of existing EU laws, including a host of tough environmental laws. Some states coped more successfully with regulatory harmonization than did others, so what explains variation in their patterns of national adjustment?

The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics. By Richard Johnston, Michael G. Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216p. $55.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The 2000 presidential election in the United States provides Richard Johnston, Michael Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson with a “natural experiment” to investigate the dynamics of support for George W. Bush and for Al Gore over the course of the campaign. As we all know, the 2000 election gave somewhat contradictory results: a popular majority for one candidate and an Electoral College majority for the other. Further, the campaign had two distinct elements that these researchers capitalize on for their work—the nationwide news coverage provided by the mass media and the campaign ads running on television chiefly, if not exclusively, in the battleground states. Given the difference between the forecasts provided by previously reliable models of presidential campaigns and the actual outcome of the 2000 contest, Johnston et al. ask whether campaign dynamics may account for the disparity.

The Policy Partnership: Presidential Elections and American Democracy. By Bruce Buchanan. New York: Routledge, 2004. 160p. $90.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Imagine that George W. Bush had run for reelection on a detailed program of Social Security reform that he could point to after his inauguration as a plan that had been considered and endorsed by the American people. Jittery Republican members of Congress, wary of making substantial changes to a popular program, could take comfort in the political shelter afforded them by voters who had, through the vehicle of the presidential election, already ratified the broad blueprints of the Bush plan, and opposition Democrats would feel pressure to come to the table to address the people's will. Similarly, imagine that John Kerry had opposed President Bush with a detailed plan of his own for making Social Security solvent, which, had he been elected, would have for the same set of reasons facilitated broad bipartisan support and congressional action.

The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation. By Desmond King. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 229p. $29.95.

A half century ago, Louis Hartz articulated how extensively U.S. political culture was steeped in Lockian individualism, a contention subsequently echoed, in a more critical vein, by the seminal studies of Robert Bellah and Robert Putnam. However, in terms of nation building, Desmond King challenges the conventional wisdom that discrimination against individuals due to some group identity has been overcome so as to realize a nation that first and foremost celebrates “a formal equality of individual rights” (pp. 6–7). Instead, he contends that “group-based distinctions” (p. 7) have always characterized U.S. nationalism and will continue to do so despite political and theoretical rhetoric to the contrary.

Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Edited by Bruce E. Cain, Russell J. Dalton, and Susan E. Scarrow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 328p. $49.95.

For those who assume that within those countries we commonly consider to be the wealthiest and most stable liberal democracies, there exists a single shape, form, and formula for democracy itself, they need to consult this bold, innovative, and informative volume. Bruce Cain, Russell Dalton, and Susan Scarrow have edited a superb collection of 11 chapters (including the introduction), written by 15 internationally renowned students of comparative political analysis (including the editors), dealing with a simple and clear set of questions, namely: 1) Has representative democracy among the most industrially advanced liberal democracies of the world undergone a series of reforms during the past 20 years or so? 2) What is the nature and form of this reform? 3) In what way, if at all, has this change affected the quality and nature of democracy in these countries?

Southern Political Party Activists: Patterns of Conflict and Change, 1991–2001. Edited by John A. Clark and Charles L. Prysby. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004. 254p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

John Clark and Charles Prysby have written an outstanding book on southern politics and political parties. The edited volume is not unusual in this field, and this particular edition is one of the strongest I have read. Clark and Prysby and their contributors chart the rising polarization of party activists within the Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S. South. They empirically demonstrate, with an impressive 11-state survey of more than 7,000 local party activists, that the distinctive South in partisan activist politics is falling to the wayside.

The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. By Larry D. Kramer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 363p. $29.95.

The provocative premise of this book is that “the people themselves,” in James Madison's phrase, are the enforcers of constitutional boundaries and limits. In Larry Kramer's able hands, popular sovereignty is not an abstraction, where the people quickly fade from view and the Constitution they ratified is given life by courts and lawyers. On the contrary, Kramer seeks to document how the people themselves are not just active participants in the constitutional enterprise but the fundamental bearers of constitutionalism.

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. By Kanchan Chandra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 368p. $80.00.

In the post-9/11 world where the “clash of civilizations” has moved beyond classroom debates to the public realm, it is refreshing, and challenging, to see a study that does not give ethnicity an easy ride. The title of this book is slightly misleading, though, because even while it concedes that appeals for political support on the basis of ethnic categories based on “race, caste, tribe or religion” (p. 2) are frequently made, sometimes with considerable success, it asserts that such tactics do not always succeed. When they do, it is not necessarily because of their putative appeal to sentiments but, instead, because both ethnic candidates and their supporters, rather than being swayed by appeals to their nonrational selves, are actually driven by sophisticated calculations of expected gain. Their utility calculus takes the size of the ultimate prize as well as the probability of winning it into account when they choose to align themselves with one set of politicians as opposed to another. Kanchan Chandra's parsimonious and general model explains why ethic parties in India, riding on Hindu or, for that matter, Tamil nationalism, succeed in some contexts but not in others.

The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, but Join Much Less. By Seymour Martin Lipset and Noah M. Meltz with Rafael Gomez and Ivan Katchanovski. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 240p. $32.50.

This short book asks excellent questions and presents interesting results from a survey of Canadian and U.S. attitudes toward unions, as well as useful data on union membership, but its explanation of the contrasting trajectories of organized labor on either side of the border is unconvincing. The core problem is Seymour Lipset and Noah Meltz's cultural theory that the two countries have different political and social value foundations—“social democratic” Canada and “libertarian” America—which do not change but explain the post-1964 divergence of union membership in the two countries.