James Madison: The Theory and Practice of Republican Government. Edited by Samuel Kernell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 400p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This collection of essays illustrates both the problems and possibilities of turning to James Madison for illumination as if he were a contemporary political scientist. Conceived in a conference to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Madison's birth, this volume is written by public choice theorists, the latest group of political scientists who claim to be Madison's heirs. In particular, the authors explore his understanding of the relationship of institutional design to policy outcomes and his insights into the use of interests and incentives to influence the behavior of politicians, groups, and ordinary citizens. They also examine his observations about free-riding, collective action, the delegation of authority from citizens to representatives, and the problems of “agency” responsibility and loss that result from delegation. Yet another goal of these authors is to explore the intellectual sources and experiences that led to Madison's keen insights into some of the basic concepts that have become central to public choice theory.

Cash, Color, and Colonialism: The Politics of Tribal Acknowledgment. By Renée Ann Cramer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. 224p. $24.95.

The literature of tribal politics and federal Indian law has largely been the province of law reviews and legal scholars. The subject matter is complicated, confusing, and contradictory. There are more than 500 Indian tribes and native villages that have been acknowledged (recognized) by the federal government, and each of these governments is unique in its history, heritage, culture, language, and land. Unlike other governments within the United States, tribal governments have no constitutional basis; therefore, they have been treated over the years by the United States as foreign nations (treaties and wars), as wards of the government (reservations and trust status), and as sovereign dependent nations. Federal Indian law is rendered more obscure by the fact that it affects less than 2% of the American population, and that, largely rural, population has the highest rate of poverty and unemployment in the country. All of these factors have led the First Americans to be highly marginalized in American politics, both by politicians and political scientists. This recently changed when the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) (1988), allowed gaming on Indian reservations, if the states wherein they were located allowed such gambling even under restricted conditions. The success of Indian gaming establishments has produced a type of Indian Renaissance, but only for federally acknowledged tribes. Indian tribes and communities that are not federally acknowledged have been unable to share in these economic and cultural benefits. Federal acknowledgment is the critical factor in the success of an Indian tribe in maintaining its sovereignty, culture, economy, and land base. Without federal acknowledgment, a tribe is not a tribe and its members are not Indians, regardless of heritage.

It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office. By Jennifer Lawless and Richard L. Fox. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 220p. $65.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.

Women and Elective Office: Past, Present, and Future. Edited by Sue Thomas and Clyde Wilcox. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 344p. $21.95.

In comparative perspective, the United States ranks fifty-seventh among the world's nations in terms of female legislative representation. Even elections to state positions, where women have gained over 20% of seats, have lagged in recent years, reflecting a kind of stagnation in the opportunity structure for women at all levels of the political system. However, when women run for office, they win in the same proportions as their male counterparts.

Electoral Politics Is Not Enough: Racial and Ethnic Minorities and Urban Politics. By Peter F. Burns. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 192p. $60.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

In their 1984 book Protest Is Not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in City Politics, Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb argued that political incorporation of ethnic and racial minorities through an electoral coalition with white liberals was the key for minority access to power in urban areas of the United States. By means of conventional coalition politics, African Americans and Latinos could get what they wanted from government.

Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise. By Steven Andrew Light and Kathryn R. L. Rand. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 240p. $29.95.

Is gambling the answer to reservation poverty—the “new buffalo,” as some Native Americans have called it? In some places, such as the Pequots' Foxwoods in Connecticut, small groups of American Indians have been enriched. In other places, such as the New York Oneida Nation in Upstate New York, gambling has provided a rather vaguely constituted polity the means with which to hire police who force dissident antigambling traditionalists from their homes. Among the Mohawks at Akwesasne, people have died over the issue.

Elusive Togetherness: Church Group's Trying to Bridge America's Divisions. By Paul Lichterman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 331p. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity. By Robert Wuthnow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 391p. $29.95.

Robert Wuthnow's latest book is a wide-ranging and insightful study into how Americans are responding to dramatic increases in religious and cultural diversity. Wuthnow gives particular attention here to the ways in which Christians are addressing (or ignoring) the growing populations of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other followers of non-Western religions in America. His aim is not only to understand the current terms by which American Christians are negotiating an increasingly complex and diverse religious setting but also to pointedly ask how pluralistic Americans are willing to be. The answers that are revealed throughout this book, drawing from hundreds of in-depth interviews and a large cross-national survey, offer plenty of room for deep worry as well as guarded optimism. Moving beyond these caged responses, Wuthnow pulls together the ambivalent stands of America's present attitudes toward religious differences and offers suggestive ideas about how Americans might begin to move beyond their currently shallow responses to diversity and embrace a more active, self-conscious form of pluralism, what he calls “reflective pluralism” (p. 289).

Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. By Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 336p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

In this volume, Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins elaborate on the “cartel” theory of parties in the U.S. Congress that was first set forth in their earlier book, Legislative Leviathan (1993), and present a substantial body of new evidence in support of this theory. The central thesis of the new book is that a form of party government has been present continuously in the House of Representatives since the adoption of the Reed Rules in the 1890s.

The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy. By Richardson Dilworth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 280p. $49.95.

In his book, Richardson Dilworth takes the familiar argument that cities use development policy to compete for residents in our fragmented metropolitan areas and flips it on its head. In Dilworth's account, development policy is an important causal factor in the creation of the fragmented metropolitan areas in which this competition occurs. His detailed historical accounts of how communities in New York and New Jersey in the late 1800s dealt with issues of incorporation, consolidation, and annexation speak to current interest among urban politics scholars in patterns of suburbanization and the politics of regional coordination. By providing interesting accounts of how a good goes from being defined as private to public (e.g., water, gas), this book may also interest public policy scholars more generally.

Healthy, Wealthy and Fair. Edited by James Morone and Lawrence Jacobs. New York: Oxford University Press, 382p. $29.95.

The result of the United States system for providing health insurance and care is that some citizens receive an abundance of high-quality care while others receive care that is poor, hard to come by, or both. This state of affairs does not fairly reflect public opinion; when surveyed, the majority of citizens express support for the idea that access to care is a right of citizenship. In a nation in which public policies relate strongly to public opinions, the failure to solve the health insurance problem is puzzling. Some analysts describe the health policy problem as economic: Health insurance products, the nature of health care as a good, and the hegemonic roles of providers and payers combine to produce the distribution of health benefits that now exists. The editors and contributors in this volume reject that view and describe health inequality as a political problem solvable with political solutions.

The Future of Organized Labor in American Politics. By Peter L. Francia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 216p. $42.00.

As the spiraling decline of organized labor continues unabated, the U.S. labor movement is becoming more insignificant to workers. In 2004, union density in the private sector declined to a postwar nadir below 10%. As membership drops, so does union capacity to mobilize members in the electoral sphere. But since 1995, when John Sweeney and the New Voice slate toppled Lane Kirkland as president of the AFL-CIO, Peter L. Francia argues, labor unions are more effective politically than ever. This belief is rooted in Francia's quantitative research of congressional elections in the Sweeney era from 1994 to 2002.

Mayors and the Challenge of Urban Leadership. By Richard M. Flanagan. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 230p. $34.50.

At its core, regime theory, which is now the dominant paradigm in urban politics, looks at the changing nature of governing coalitions in urban America. Richard Flanagan modifies regime theory by applying Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek's theory of executive power, which was originally developed to explain presidential politics, to mayors. In particular, Flanagan looks at how temporal factors influence mayoral leadership during regime formation, consolidation, and decay.

Uncompromising Positions: God, Sex, and the U.S. House of Representatives. By Elizabeth Anne Oldmixon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 262p. $44.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Elizabeth Oldmixon rightly observes that heretofore few, if any, books have been devoted exclusively to the study of congressional voting behavior and legislative sponsorship on moral conflicts. The existing body of research, including my own work, is based on scholarly articles that analyze roll call voting on abortion, mainly, with some attention to gay rights. I was not aware of any systematic analysis of roll calls on school prayer, that is, until the publication of this volume. In sum, Oldmixon's purview includes roll calls and legislative sponsorship of bills on abortion, homosexuality, and school prayer in the 103rd through the 107th Congresses.

In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. By John G. Geer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 218p. $47.50 cloth, $19.00 paper.

This book begins with a series of quotes from scholars and media pundits arguing that negative political advertisements are uncivil, mean-spirited, emotion-laden distortions of the truth, which not only smear their target but also mislead voters and undermine the political process itself; in short, they are the scourge of democracy. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. But John Geer asks us to reject the starting assumption that attack ads are bad. In fact, he argues that democracy requires candidates to attack each other. His argument is simple but powerful: All advertisements, by their very nature, exaggerate the truth. But this point applies equally to negative and positive ads. We cannot expect political candidates to fairly discuss their weaknesses along with their strengths. That is the role of the opposition, and it can only be done by offering criticisms of the opposing candidate or party. The real questions, then, are 1) whether negative ads perform their role effectively, or instead distort and confuse the vote choices citizens must make; and 2) whether attack ads, in performing a role that seems to be required of them, nonetheless undermine the democratic political system of which they are a crucial part.

Women with a Mission: Religion, Gender, and the Politics of Women Clergy. By Laura R. Olson, Sue E. S. Crawford, and Melissa M. Deckman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 190p. $37.50.

This book explores the role of women clergy in mainline Protestant churches and the rabbinate. It is based largely on 54 in-depth interviews conducted in 1998 in four U.S. cities (Indianapolis, Omaha, Milwaukee, and Washington, DC), but also includes considerable material from a much larger national survey of clergy. The authors are most interested in the “political” role of their subjects and in how their gender affects this role. They themselves define “politics” very broadly, as “actions taken to influence collective decision-making processes concerning resource distribution or the development and enforcement of shared values” (p. 14). But they do not impose this definition on their subjects. Instead, the clergywomen are asked about the issues and concerns that motivate them, what kinds of activities they consider most appropriate or helpful to address those concerns, and what their own involvement has been in such activities. In both the interviews and the national survey, around a third of the women indicated that gender “in some way” limited her ability to participate in politics. Three-quarters of the interviewees volunteered gender as a factor (either an asset or a liability) for political activity, or as a reason why particular issues were especially salient to them. But few mentioned either their denomination or its women's caucuses as a factor linking their gender with political involvement.

Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics. By James G. Gimpel and Jason E. Schuknecht. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 488p. $58.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

James Gimpel and Jason Schuknecht are on a mission to revive the study of U.S. political geography. In their book, the duo make a compelling case for what party strategists, candidates, and pundits already know: Place matters generally and, sometimes, significantly. The authors, however, take readers far beyond a simplistic “Maryland-is-different-from-Arkansas” viewpoint or a red- versus blue-state dichotomy to a sophisticated and nuanced investigation of sectionalism.

Courts, Liberalism, and Rights: Gay Law and Politics in the United States and Canada. By Jason Pierceson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. 264p. $68.50 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The Case for Gay Rights: From Bowers to Lawrence and Beyond. By David A. J. Richards. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. 256p. $29.95.

If one assesses the maturity, as well as legitimacy, of a field of study through the scholarship that it produces, these two excellent books—one by an established scholar (David A. J. Richards) and the other by a relative newcomer (Jason Pierceson)—show just how far gay rights, as a field of scholarly inquiry, has come in the last few decades. Both books provide compelling arguments on behalf of the view that liberal political theory, when coupled with vigorous judicial review, can provide previously marginalized groups, like sexual minorities, with meaningful rights of equality and autonomy.

The American Constitution and the Debate over Originalism. By Dennis J. Goldford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 305p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The most common way to think about questions of constitutional interpretation is in terms of the debate between originalism and living constitutionalism. Both sides in that debate assert their fidelity to the true meaning of “the text” by talking about something else, the original understanding of the ratifiers or contemporary societal norms. Dennis Goldford wants to restructure that discussion; he wants to open up the black box of “the text” and make it the subject of the discussion. This, he insists, is the only way to resolve the “Madisonian dilemma” of reconciling democratic values with the idea of a binding constitution.

Why Government Succeeds and Why It Fails. By Amihai Glazer and Lawrence S. Rothenberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 224p. $42.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

In a 1964 book review (“American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory, World Politics 16 [4]: 677, 693–715), Theodore Lowi challenged the conventional wisdom that politics determined policy. The causal relationship, he argued, ran in the opposite direction: “[F]or every type of policy there is likely to be a distinctive type of political relationship” (1964, 688). In their bold effort to explain why government succeeds (and why it fails), Amihai Glazer and Lawrence Rothenberg again prompt us to examine the relationship between politics and policy, this time by setting the “political machinations” of politicians and interest groups to the side in order to ask: How do economic conditions impact the success or failure of a public policy? To try to determine the success or failure of a policy by examining “only the interaction between politicians and constituencies is like investigating the efficacy of medical treatment by looking only at the motives of physicians and ignoring the biology of different diseases” (p. 2). For Glazer and Rothenberg, an exclusive focus on politics ignores the “biology” (so to speak) of different policies that are best discovered by examining the ways in which rational economic actors respond to government actions. More specifically, they argue that an analysis of public policy based upon four economic constraints—credibility, rational expectations, crowding out or in, and multiple equilibria—will help reveal the kinds of problems that government is most likely able to solve, and why.

The Politics of Public Health in the United States. By Kent Patel and Mark E. Rushefsky. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. 346p. $84.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

“It is clear,” write the authors, “that the public health system in the U.S. has suffered from political neglect in the last 50 years or so, and the revitalization of the U.S. public health system will necessitate confronting many of the challenges facing it in the twenty-first century” (p. 7). Kent Patel and Mark Rushefsky's survey of the politics of American public health argues that our system emphasizes curative treatment of existing illnesses at the expense of activities aimed at preventing them. Although the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, public health activities account for only about 2% to 3% of such expenditures. The low priority given public health, they argue, accounts for America's poor performance relative to other industrialized countries on measures of life expectancy and infant mortality.

Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America. By Robert A. Williams, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 312p. $57.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

For two decades, Robert Williams has been developing a powerful critique of federal Indian law, calling for his readers to recognize its irredeemably racist roots. In Williams's view, if we try to build Native American policy from the racist materials of the past, we will inevitably build racism into Indian law of the future. Ultimately, we must therefore recognize that racism lies at the foundation of the American legal system. To many, this message is a bitter pill. But in his view, only after we swallow it will we be able to construct a better foundation for federal Indian policy. And precisely because many hope to avoid this medicine, his call is enormously important. Much as we might like to, he will not let us look away.