Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution. By Evan Gerstmann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 236p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

One hundred and twenty years ago, the Congress of the United States was embroiled in a debate over how best to regulate a type of marriage that appalled most Americans. Republicans were making political capital out of their vigorous and vitriolic attacks against the idea of such marriages, while Democrats were looking for a way to finesse the issue to maintain the political support of the unpopular minority believing in such marriages without offending the majority. Laws were introduced and passed prohibiting these marriages. Fearing that a law would be insufficient, however, a constitutional amendment was proposed to ban such marriages. The Supreme Court upheld the right of states to criminalize such marriages, though it was never asked to rule on the right of a state to recognize such marriages. Persons wishing to enter such marriages were advised to go to a neighboring country that would recognize the legitimacy of their unions. In the 1880s, the issue was polygamy, the unpopular minority Mormons, and the neighboring country Mexico (see Edward L. Lyman, Political Deliverance, 1986). Today same-sex marriages between gays or lesbians, some marrying in Canada, are causing as much turmoil in Congress as the issue of polygamy did then.

To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution. By Robert A. McGuire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 395p. $24.95.

Charles Beard's (1913) An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States has long been a focal point for scholarly debate on the motivations of the American Founders. Beard argued that each of the Founders could be classified as merchants with “personalty” interests or as farmers with “realty” interests and that political conflict during the Founding could be interpreted through the prism of conflict between these two classes. This work came to be greeted with growing disdain by scholars who found his “Marxist” interpretation of the Founding inadequate, but given the rise of rational choice theory as an important analytic tool for political scientists, another look at Beard's theory through modern conceptual lenses is long overdue.

Of Time and Judicial Behavior: United States Supreme Court Agenda-Setting and Decision-Making, 1888–1997.

Presidents and the Politics of Agency Design: Political Insulation in the United States Government Bureaucracy, 1946–1997.

Pluralism at Yale: The Culture of Political Science in America. By Richard M. Merelman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 325p. $55.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Because Richard Merelman was a Ph.D. student at Yale during the period that he writes about in this book, his project instantly arouses the suspicion, as he knows, that it stems more from personal than scholarly preoccupations. As a result, Pluralism at Yale is, if anything, excessively scholarly in its architecture and arguments. But regardless of where the motivation for his work ultimately comes from, Merelman's book exemplifies an unusual but eminently defensible, potentially illuminating mode of serious political science research. Ironically, its limitations come not from the fact that it centers on a remarkably in-depth study of a single political science department but from the ways it does not take that study far enough.

Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America. By James G. Gimpel, J. Celeste Lay, and Jason E. Schuknecht. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 278p. $32.95.

Scholarly studies of political socialization began a dramatic decline during the mid-1970s. One source of this downward spiral lay in the dwindling novelty of studying pre-adults. Political scientists are accustomed to dealing with the “real world” of politics, one occupied and ruled by adults. After a prolonged lull, research began to increase in the 1990s and has continued onward. One driving force in this renewal stems from the decline in civic virtue among upcoming cohorts said to characterize most Western countries. A second influence was the crumbling of the former Soviet Union and the appearance of transitional and new democracies around the globe. In an effort to understand each of these developments and to propose possible solutions, a variety of institutions and scholars have returned to the question of citizenship development, often with the intention of improving the inculcation of civic virtue among the young.

Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide. By Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Mary Stansbury. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. 208p. $19.95.

Whether or not certain demographic groups within society have sufficient access to information and communication technology (ICT) has become a major subject of debate. So-called digital divides have been examined in regard to many demographic categories, such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, and even the level of urbanization. Most empirical efforts to examine issues of technological inequities within the United States have been primarily descriptive in nature and theoretically limited in scope. Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide adds a valuable contribution to the debate by examining not only who has access to ICT but also to what extent they have sufficient skills to truly make use of such technologies and the information that they potentially provide.

Legislative Deferrals: Statutory Ambiguity, Judicial Power, and American Democracy.

No Fire Next Time: Black-Korean Conflicts and the Future of America's Cities. By Patrick D. Joyce. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 240 pages. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Patrick D. Joyce's book not only has a provocative title but also says something important about the future of America's cities. Joyce argues that the United States, and by extension, especially its cities, faces a contentious future, and that this is suggested by three trends: First, racial and ethnic diversity is increasing; second, economic inequality has widened; and third, our governing institutions have weakened. He suggests that these trends originate in separate causes, but their coming together at the same point in history means that the potential for racial and ethnic tension may be heightened just as our capacity to cope with them have diminished (p. 3). Central to his concerns is the black-Korean conflict in American cities.

Taming Regulation: Superfund and the Challenge of Regulatory Reform. By Robert T. Nakamura and Thomas W. Church. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 141p. $46.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The central question for this book is how government agencies can “reconcile the necessary use of coercion in regulatory programs with the need to retain popular support” (p. 1). The authors answer this question by examining changes in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) “Superfund” program during the latter half of the 1990s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, reforming Superfund was a salient political issue. Scholars and stakeholders alike considered Superfund a failed program, and during this period, more than a dozen bills were debated in Congress with the aim of significantly reducing its scope or eliminating the program altogether.

Electoral Democracy.

The Urban Voter: Group Conflict and Mayoral Voting Behavior in American Cities. By Karen M. Kaufmann. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 248p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In her book, Karen M. Kaufmann persuasively argues that context shapes the degree to which racial and ethnic factors structure voting in mayoral elections. While this may sound obvious, what is not obvious is determining which contextual factors matter and how they matter to urban voters. Her answer, in part, provides an explanation for how two quintessentially Democratic cities—Los Angeles and New York City—elected (and reelected) Republican mayors during the 1990s, a fact that alarmed local activists and intrigued both urban scholars and political pundits alike.

Constructing Identities in Mexican American Political Organizations: Choosing Issues, Taking Sides.

Signaling Goodness: Social Rules and Public Choice. By Phillip J. Nelson and Kenneth V. Greene. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 261p. $55.00.

Are people good? Can they be? Is goodness intentional, or consequential? One way to think of goodness derives from Adam Smith's baker, whose selfishness drives him to bake good, cheap bread. If “good” institutions are enough, we can design mechanisms (with markets being one, but only one archetype) where the collective consequences of self-interest are not harmful. In politics, this invisible hand is the focus of Federalist #51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes. By Paul M. Kellstedt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 155p. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

The literature on race and public opinion has been dominated by the debate between those who emphasize the continuing role of prejudice or racial resentment and those who emphasize the role of other values and ideologies, such as limited government or individualism, in explaining sources of individual-level support and opposition to current race policy. Thus, it is refreshing to find a book like The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes, which looks at racial attitudes from a different perspective. In the tradition of Howard Schuman and his colleagues in Racial Attitudes in America (1997), Paul Kellstedt demonstrates and explains variation in the American public's racial policy preferences over the last half of the twentieth-century. Kellstedt draws on the existing opinion and media effects literature to develop a theory that can explain how the public as a whole evolves on matters of race. This book's most valuable contribution comes from the specific attention he gives to media framing. Many researchers suggest a role for media coverage in the development and trajectory of racial policy preferences over this period, yet little empirical work examines this relationship. Using an innovative approach, the author provides convincing evidence that media coverage “is an important part of a system of influences that determine public opinion on race in America” (p. 134).