Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice. Edited by Neil J. Diamant, Stanley B. Lubman, and Kevin J. O'Brien. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 256p. $49.50.

This book, an outgrowth of a 2002 conference held at the University of California at Berkeley, takes as a given the importance of law as an operational concept in China. Rather, the fundamental questions for investigation are 1) how, when, and to whom law matters, and 2) how to study the relationship between law and society (p. 3). Traditionally, the study of Chinese law has been the preserve of legal specialists, predominantly lawyers, who have focused their attention on the institutional development of the Chinese legal system. This book takes an alternative approach in that it seeks to broaden the scope of investigation of Chinese legal issues. The contributors are primarily young scholars in the social sciences—notably political science and sociology—who report on their recent field research in China.

The System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies. By Rasma Karklins. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. 219p. $69.95 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Comedian Flip Wilson headlined his first nationwide television special in September 1969. Risking his tentative hold on a new (white) audience, Wilson joked about a minister's wife who justified her latest shopping spree by claiming, “The Devil made me buy this dress.” This declaration of self-indulgence later developed into “the Devil made me do it” and became a staple for one of the show's most popular recurring characters, Geraldine Jones. A comic genius, Flip Wilson understood the importance of a tag line that would resonate with his audience. Few fantasies can be more widespread than abdicating personal responsibility in the pursuit of a good time.

Voting the Agenda: Candidates, Elections and Ballot Propositions. By Stephen P. Nicholson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 208p. $35.00

Many good books are published in political science, but rarely is one so powerful that it restructures the study of politics in multiple subfields. Stephen Nicholson's Voting the Agenda may be such a book, as it forces scholars to reconsider how we study not only voting and elections but also Congress, the presidency, state legislatures, governors, direct democracy, the media, and political campaigns.

Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era: A Reexamination of Electoral Accountability in the United States, 1828–2000. By Peter F. Nardulli. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 284p. $39.50.

Peter Nardulli's book blends syntheses of previous research and new empirical analysis to address the question of the capacity of American voters to hold political leaders accountable through elections—to achieve, that is, “popular efficacy.” The book begins by interpreting previous scholarly research as depicting voters as “manageable fools” because of their limited cognitive abilities for political evaluation (Chapter 2) and their habitual reliance on party identifications to dictate their vote choices (Chapter 4). Given this, why do politicians pay attention to public concerns? The original empirical analysis of the book answers this question. It shows how variations in and deviations from the normal vote are related to exogenous forces beyond the control of politicians, rather than habitual party loyalties or political strategies. The realization that their fortunes are tied to forces beyond their control, in turn, induces strategic politicians to be responsive to the public's core concerns.

China's Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead. By Bruce Gilley. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 320p. $29.50 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Much of the scholarship on democratization in China falls into roughly two camps. Some argue that democracy in China is or will be a bottom-up process. Others aver that it will be an elite-driven top-down phenomenon. Bruce Gilley is firmly in the second camp. He argues that democratization is likely to occur as China's more moderate and liberal leaders recognize, in the face of “a multiple metastatic dysfunction,” the tenuous hold they have on China and move toward democratization as a means of minimizing their losses.

How Management Matters: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Welfare Reform. By Norma M. Riccucci. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 224p. $26.95.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) famously ended welfare “as we knew it”—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—and replaced the 60-year-old AFDC with a new program pointedly called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. TANF substantially increased state discretion in choosing how to aid families with children, but it also established various process requirements that were intended to increase efforts to move unemployed adult recipients into jobs. The new regulations generally require close interaction between benefit recipients (often disingenuously termed “customers”) and local agency personnel. Presumably, it is in these interactions that recipient understanding of the nature and terms of public assistance is to some extent formed. If it is the objective of welfare reform to change these perceptions, reform must address what happens when those seeking help encounter the system.

The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies. Edited by Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 361p. $95.00.

This book, consisting of an introductory and concluding chapter by the editors and 13 case studies by country specialists, subjects the fashionable thesis of the growing presidentialization of the chief executive office to systematic comparative review. The countries studied are mainly in Western Europe but also include Israel, Canada, and the United States. Authors address a common set of questions within the context of each country, shaped by an initial conceptual examination of what constitutes presidentialization. This is distinguished from the simple existence of a presidential or semipresidential constitutional regime. While both favor presidentialism, in the sense of the power and autonomy of the head of government, this can fluctuate over time, as it can within the classic parliamentary systems. This distinction between presidentialization as a process and the constitutional provisions for a presidential or parliamentary system is a useful feature of the book. Given the potential confusion between these regime types and the dynamic process that is the book's focus, it is perhaps unfortunate that another name could not have been found for the processes favoring executive autonomy and power. However, given that popular and journalistic discussions have already found a name for them, it is perhaps inevitable that they should be termed presidentialization in spite of the potential ambiguities of the term.

First Person Political: Legislative Life and the Meaning of Public Service. By Grant Reeher. New York: New York University Press, 2006. 216p. $65.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

At a time when public disillusionment with elected leaders and political institutions is increasing rapidly, it is refreshing to read a book that highlights the selfless nature of public service.

Alienated: Immigrant Rights, The Constitution, and Equality in America. By Victor C. Romero. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 320p. $42.00.

Victor Romero is convinced that the Constitution, properly understood, extends to all people living in the United States, citizens and noncitizens alike, the same constitutional and statutory rights. That is the theme of his book. Romero concedes that the federal judiciary has failed, as often as not, to provide this parity—in part because it vacillates uneasily between the so-called personhood and membership paradigms—between guaranteeing every person, regardless of immigration status, due process and equal protection of the laws, and deferring almost reflexively to the political branches whenever it is confronted with issues involving the admission or deportation of aliens.

The Business of Lobbying in China. By Scott Kennedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 278p. $49.95.

In this fascinating monograph, Scott Kennedy explores the nature of state–society relations through the lens of business lobbying. He begins his work by criticizing existing approaches in comparative politics, which often try to fit various countries into a few standard models of state–society relations: pluralism, corporatism, clientelism, and monism. Given the complexity and dynamism in China's economy, Kennedy makes the astute observation that no single model suffices to describe the complex business–government relations in China. As he puts it succinctly, “countries do not just have one political economy, but multiple political economies” (p. 160).

The Politics of Democratic Inclusion. Edited by Christina Wolbrecht and Rodney E. Hero. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 352p. $69.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Are edited volumes an endangered species? Publishers report poor sales of most titles, junior faculty are advised not to publish in them lest tenure committees frown, and a scant few feature pathbreaking research. Yet occasionally, an essay collection reminds us of the considerable benefits of this scholarly genre. The best edited volumes are oriented around a compelling theme, address that core from diverse perspectives, and feature a collection of expert authors working at a high scholarly pitch. The Politics of Democratic Inclusion is one such book.

Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. By Daniel N. Posner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 337p. $70.00 cloth, 26.99 paper.

In the popular mind, ethnic conflict in Africa invariably revolves around deep-seated tribal identities and rivalries. Unfortunately, this perspective ignores the fact that Africans, like people everywhere, have multiple group identities. Although Daniel Posner singles out tribal affiliations as an important source of ethnic cleavage in Africa, he sees ethnicity as also including group identities based on race, clan, region, language, and religion. While much of the book provides a meticulous examination of the evolution of ethnic cleavage structures and ethnic politics in one African country, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, as the title indicates, is far more than a detailed case study of Zambia, a former British colony known as Northern Rhodesia before independence. It is also a splendid primer as to how to systematically apply institutional analysis to explain political behavior.

This Is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles. By Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 192p. $56.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Jean Baudrillard once argued that “there is no theory of the media” (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 1981, p. 164). Perhaps one might say the same in regard to a theory of culture, but Ronald Schmidt helps move us toward a better understanding of both. His book helps us recognize the link between the media and political culture. Akin to Baudrillard, Schmidt discusses the rhetoric and images used by the economic and political elite to reinforce the latent social and political hierarchies in society.

American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short. By Robert Wuthnow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 298p. $29.95.

Robert Wuthnow's insightful book examines the stories that we Americans like to believe about ourselves, not so much for the purpose of discovering whether those stories are true—though he presents plenty of evidence to show both truth and falsity in them—as for the sake of showing what the United States needs to become a better nation. The falsity in those “narratives” makes our perceptions of ourselves biased (p. 1), he argues; but because they function at the level of “deep meaning” behind our collective thinking (p. 25), we rarely question their validity. Such questioning should be the work of “reflective democracy” (p. 3), a combination of opinions from experts and the masses. Since the United States is a country of immigrants, Wuthnow relies on interviews with “new immigrant elites because they provide a particularly interesting informational context in which to examine ideas about cultural renewal” (p. 9). It stands to reason that elites will be more interesting than the masses, but is Wuthnow's sample a good way to gauge the prospects for democracy? “Cultural renewal” involves families, schools, and civic associations, but it is not always clear what he means by culture. At times he gives the word an entirely intellectual meaning (e.g., “basic values and … taken-for-granted understandings of what it means to be good people and to live responsibly in a good society” [p. 14]).

New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis. Edited by André Lecours. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 380p. $65.00 cloth, $30.95 paper.

There has been a lot of discussion over the past decade about the relevance of institutions in political science. This has led to the emergence of an explanatory discipline, new institutionalism, a prominent social theory that focuses on developing a comprehensive study of institutions, the way they interact, and the effects of institutions on society—thus providing a way of viewing how institutions evolve in very different ways, or how institutions shape the behavior of individual members and produce change. In this collection of essays, edited by André Lecours, a case is made for the ways new institutionalism helps reframe and renew the theoretical and analytical importance of political institutions in the determination of a variety of political phenomena and outcomes, as a group of scholars—mainly from Canadian universities—address a set of complex issues related to new institutionalist research.

White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. By Hewitt Roger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 172p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West. By Quintan Wiktorowicz. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 248p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

A book on the white backlash to multicultural politics and another on recruitment to a radical Islamist group seem odd choices to examine together, but the resulting dialogue emphasizes the extraordinary value of comparative methods in general and ethnographic research in particular. In Radical Islam Rising, Quintan Wiktorowicz asks why rational individuals would join a high-risk organization such as al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamist movement based in the UK. Joining entails high risk because members are “targets of stigma, harassment, retaliation, and even more extreme sanctions such as loss of a job, injury, or death” (p. 206; also pp. 45–77). Rational-actor models, he argues, cannot explain why thousands of individuals were attracted to the movement. (The group was formally disbanded in late 2004 but likely continues underground.) Wiktorowicz offers a five-stage model, and the chapters are organized accordingly.

Ethnic Politics after Communism. Edited by Zoltan Barany and Robert G. Moser. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 296p. $19.95.

In the wake of communism's collapse, dire predictions of intractable ethno-religious conflict throughout the post-Soviet and East Central European territories were the order of the day. Although ethnic violence overshadowed opportunities for political transformation in the Caucuses and Balkans during the 1990s, many of the potential fault lines of ethnic conflict have weathered the tumultuous period of transition either without incident or via institutionally regulated means. While it is fortunate in human terms that the latent ethnic tensions in most instances fell short of their genocidal potential, the failure of political science and sociology to predict accurately the scope of ethnic conflict resulting from the implosion of communist regimes highlights the limitations of social science, especially when the events it purports to explain are rapidly unfolding. With a firm grasp of these limitations and 15 years of hindsight, Zoltan Barany and Robert Moser, in their edited volume, reassess the impact that regime change and state collapse have had on identity and ethnicity and, in turn, how ethnicity and nationalism have shaped the transitions from real socialism.

Imagining Brazil. Edited by Jessé Souza and Walter Sinder. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 318p. $95.00.

This book approaches the impact of globalization on peripheral societies by identifying the philosophical, cultural, and economic transformations that accompanied Brazil's modernization in the twentieth century. By emphasizing the foundations of national identity and searching for points of resonance between these foundations and the forces of globalization, the authors examine the conceptions of modernity and intersections of the global context with what it is—and what it means—to be Brazilian.

The Supreme Court in the American Legal System. By Jeffrey A. Segal, Harold J. Spaeth, and Sara C. Benesh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 416p. $75.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

If there is any example of a Kuhnian paradigm in political science, it would be the attitudinal model in Supreme Court decision making. Over a half century ago, C. Herman Pritchett boldly showed data that revealed “political” decision making by the justices of the nation's high court. Harold Spaeth was among the pioneers in this research and is now regarded as its strongest adherent. The justification for the Supreme Court Attitudinal Model, known to friends and foes alike by the acronym “SCAM,” is relatively simple: The preponderance of individual-level decision making can be explained as a function of the attitudes of the justices. Like the ideal model, it is parsimonious and explains a great deal of variance. Even those who have been critical of SCAM concede that the attitudes of the justices are the most important determinant of individual-level decision making at the Supreme Court level.

Understanding the Process of Economic Change. By Douglass C. North. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 187p. $29.95.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and rapid integration into world markets failed to produce anything like an effective capitalist economy in its Russian successor state, many economists found that failure puzzling. Not Douglass North. So far as I know, North did not predict the Soviet Union's fall or the subsequent chaos of its economy. But he had long since put in place an account of economic change raising serious doubts that markets alone could even function reasonably well, much less transform whole economies, without extensive institutional underpinnings.