Models of Voting in Presidential Elections: The 2000 U.S. Election. Edited by Herbert F. Weisberg and Clyde Wilcox. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 320p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This edited book on the 2000 election covers many of the traditional areas in voting behavior research, including the role of candidate evaluations, issues, and partisanship. Authors also rely on traditional models of voting behavior research, including the social-psychological, the sociological, and the rational choice model, to understand a wide variety of questions concerning the voters and vote choice in the 2000 election.

Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies. By Michael A. Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 227p. $34.95.

In his seminal essay on state legislatures (“The State of U.S. State Legislative Research,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 6 [February 1981]: 1–25), Malcolm Jewell seemed puzzled that our knowledge of state legislative representation was so limited. After all, there was a long and productive history of work on representation in Congress, and the states provided variation that could help advance our theoretical understanding of this important topic. Unfortunately, apart from recent work by Alan Rosenthal (The Decline of Representative Democracy, 1998) and a few articles on particular aspects of representation (such as casework), research over the last 20 years has not advanced our knowledge of representation as much as Jewell might have liked.

The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Constitutional Debate.

Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. By Gad Barzilai. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 314p. $65.00.

This recent monograph—at least five years in preparation—might better be described as a doubleheader. While professing to be an original tract of communitarian political theory, it happens to utilize three communities in Israel to illustrate its multiple theses. This is the twenty-first publication in the interdisciplinary “Law, Meaning and Violence” series edited by Martha Minow, Austin Sarat, and Elaine Scarry, which explores how law's narratives, practices, and institutions embody and give voice to power and violence. The volume recently won the Yonathan Shapiro Prize for the best book in Israel Studies from the Association of Israel Studies. But instead of concentrating on the otherwise ubiquitous topic of Israel's national security vis-à-vis the occupied territories, it highlights the social and political rights and identities of insular, internal minority groups that choose between legal action and violence when confronted with state power.

Bringing Society Back In: Grassroots Ecosystem Management, Accountability, and Sustainable Communities.

Black Faces in the mirror: African Americans and Their Representation in the U.S. Congress. By Katherine Tate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 224p. $37.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This is an exceedingly useful study in helping to clarify some of the conflicting findings of researchers addressing the viability of the political representation of African Americans, in this case, within the U.S. House of Representatives. Katherine Tate begins to clarify, at the outset, the frequently used categories of “descriptive” and “substantive” representation by including Hanna Pitkin's “symbolic” representation, or descriptive representation devoid of substance, as the major conceptual focus of discussion.

Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World.

Out of Touch: The Presidency and Public Opinion. By Michael J. Towle. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. 176p. $37.95.

Public support is vital to the governing strategies of modern presidents. Although presidents, White House staff, and presidency scholars take this for granted during the “permanent campaign,” little is known about how administrations react to and interpret information about the public's support for the president. Michael J. Towle asks, How do presidential administrations interpret their wealth of public-opinion polling data? He observes that interpretation of these data by the Truman, Johnson, and Carter administrations varies by the president's own public standing: The more the president's public support declines, the more “out of touch” he becomes with the public.

Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. By Vivek Chibber. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 335p. $39.50 cloth.

Vivek Chibber's book is exceptionally clear, fresh, empirically rich, and analytically tight. It clears some conventional cobwebs in thinking about developmental states. It should be read widely.

Islam, Charity, and Activism: Middle-Class Networks and Social Welfare in Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen. By Janine A. Clark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 256p. $49.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World. By Mohammed M. Hafez. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. 240p. $52.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach. Edited by Quintan Wiktorowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 320p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

It is a pleasure to read three well-researched books that use a social movement approach to explain contemporary Islamic activism. A combination of rigorous fieldwork and focused use of theory offers an alternative viewing lens for a host of issues involving social work, women's activism, use of violence, recruitment strategies, protest movements, political participation, and economic reforms.

Deepening Democracy: Global Governance and Political Reform in Latin America. By Francis Adams. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 184p. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Quiet Revolution: Decentralization and the Rise of Political Participation in Latin American Cities. By Tim Campbell. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. 216p. $24.95.

The terms employed by the authors of these two books may be different, as are their titles, but the phenomena they identify are amazingly similar and the periods they examine are practically identical. What Francis Adams identifies as a “remarkable political transformation” and Tim Campbell calls a “quiet revolution” are the steps toward democratization and decentralization that have marked Latin American politics and society in the last two decades. Taking as their point of departure the political reforms of the state since the late 1980s, the empowerment of civil society through decentralization, and the fact of democratic transition itself, both authors paint a picture of progress and hope for a region of the world that not very long ago seemed mired in the throes of authoritarian governance and economic crisis attributed to nondemocratic, overcentralized, and inefficient state practices.

Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State.

Separation, Assimilation or Accommodation: Contrasting Ethnic Minority Policies. By Terrence E. Cook. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003. 216p. $64.95.

Terrence Cook's book in the main focuses on ethnic minority policy strategies across the globe. The author distinguishes three main policy modes regarding ethnic relations: separation, assimilation, or accommodation. The book revolves around a consideration of these three main modes and two subtypes of each policy option—for example, assimilation as a strategy of a stronger ethnic group and assimilation when initiated by a weaker minority group, usually a minority. In so doing, he presents a fairly exhaustive catalog of global ethnic relations.

The Myth of Civil Society: Social Capital and Democratic Consolidation in Spain and Brazil. By Omar G. Encarnación. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 244p. $55.00.

When a Google search for “civil society promotion” turns up 847,000 potentially relevant links, it is time for a provocative book like this one. Omar Encarnación takes on the prevailing wisdom that “a strong civil society lies behind successful democracies while a weak civil society is the root of failed or flawed democracies” (p. 3), arguing not only that strong civil societies fail to ensure democratic consolidation but also that democracies can be successfully consolidated without any civil society to speak of. Indeed, “a flourishing civil society can actually be a hindrance to democratization” (p. 5). Encarnación is not the only scholar to raise doubts about the efficacy of civil society to promote a host of social benefits, but he is one of the few to do so in the context of the newly democratizing nations, where civil society promotion has perhaps the most currency today.

Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development.