Cities' pursuit of economic development activities sits at the interstices of the economic marketplace and political power. Private-sector investment is not realized in a power vacuum; political institutional and politicians' behavior influence, alter, and in many ways determine the kind and location of those private investment decisions. It is no wonder, then, that both economists and political scientists have much to say about the efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and impact of urban economic development. And it is no wonder that volumes have been written on the vast array of urban development projects from a comparative or idiosyncratic perspective. Attracting the quadrennial Olympic games is no exception. Matthew Burbank, Gregory Andranovich, and Charles Heying have performed an impressive task of compiling documents and accounts on the politics and economics surrounding the successful efforts of Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City in luring the Olympics to their cities and regions.

Jamie Mayerfeld has written a wise and morally sensitive book that he hopes will compel readers to take seriously their “prima facie duty to relieve suffering” (p. 9). Insofar as “attention to suffering has been a casualty of a long series of attacks on hedonistic utilitarianism” (p. 3), Mayerfeld offers a thorough account of the nature of suffering and argues for the view that its badness imposes a universal prima facie duty for people to try to avoid suffering. Since the purpose of moral inquiry is “to identify wrong kinds of behavior so that we can avoid them” (p. 7), Mayerfeld, not himself a utilitarian, follows a catholic approach and skillfully draws upon arguments from utilitarians, deontologists, Aristotelians, hedonists, psychologists, and philosophers to support his moral intuitions.

Not only is the practice of a genuinely Platonic political art compatible with a commitment to democracy, but, according to John Wallach's ambitious book, it furnishes a needed critical resource that can help tap the unfulfilled potential of democracy at the present time. Wallach's unconventional thesis emerges from his critical historicism, a method that attempts to carve a mean between the relatively ahistorical readings of Popper, Strauss, Arendt, Derrida, and Rorty (among others) and the radically historicist readings more typical of classicists and ancient historians (pp. 21–23). Whereas the latter tend to subordinate Plato to the historical and political forces of his time, the widely disparate interpretations of the former cohort view him as either “authoritarian” or radically “self-mocking.” In either case, Plato is portrayed as an antagonist to the freedom and equality of democratic life. To release the Platonic political art from the grip of these influential but debilitating interpretations, Wallach seeks to navigate between the ahistorical elevation of theory (logos) and the historicist subordination of theory to practice (ergon), focusing instead on the dissonance of the logos/ergon relation itself.

The rise of partisanship in Congress has been one of the most conspicuous features of American politics during the 1990s. David Rohde's (1991) Parties and Leaders in the PostReform House demonstrated that much of this rise in partisanship could be attributed to the convergence in congressional voting between Northern and Southern Democrats. Since the New Deal, the latter had traditionally allied with Republicans on many issues in a bipartisan conservative coalition that generally dominated both Houses of Congress and constrained liberal legislative outcomes. While Rohde and Barbara Sinclair (Legislators, Leaders and Lawmaking, 1995) have emphasized how institutional rule changes in the 1970s created a much greater incentive for party loyalty among member of Congress, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which enhanced partisanship in Congress has been driven by “bottom-up” electoral imperatives. Stanley Berard's new book on Southern Democrats in the House convincingly shows that major changes in the southern electoral environment were equally important in promoting convergence in the voting records of Northern and Southern Democrats, leading to a more partisan House overall.

Everybody seems to talk about accountability but no one ever does anything about it, Robert Behn argues in this thought-provoking book. This is scarcely due to a lack of enough overseers. Behn rattles off the innumerable “accountability holders”—including the GAO, lawyers, journalists, and inspectors general—who dish it out while the wretched public administrators take it. These accountability adversaries exclusively pursue either accountability for finances or accountability for fairness, doling out punishments where rules are inadequately met and feeling no obligation to consider those performance considerations that may have driven managerial choices. Public managers may be confronted by an “accountability dilemma” in pondering the trade-offs between finances and fairness and performance, but that is not the accountability holder's problem.

The waves of immigrants arriving in the United States over the last 20 years, largely from Latin America and Asia, have settled in a few states—mainly California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—and in big cities in those states. Like the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the twentieth century and the suburbanization of whites, this demographic transformation is remaking urban politics. Black and Multiracial Politics in America, a collection of original essays, addresses the implications of this change for “the practice and process of black and multiracial politics in American society” (p. xiii). The authors seek to forge a new link between the study of black and the study of multiracial politics.

When first presented with this book, I confess to harboring two strong reservations—both, as it turns out, badly misplaced. First, perhaps because the author is a widely known American who was once the president of Harvard and, therefore, spent considerable time among movers and shakers, I was prepared for a broad, rambling, and discursive book peppered with anecdotes, personal musings, name-dropping, and disconnected prescriptions for change. Second, no doubt because I have never been fond of the overarching evaluation exercises that so enthrall foundations, when I read in the introduction that this volume on government had been commissioned by three major foundations, I feared I was about to read another governmental report card accompanied by the obligatory and often vacuous justification for the grade assigned in each area.

Justice and Punishment begins promisingly. Matt Matravers notes that the question—“Why and by what right, do some people punish others?”—is “not a new question. The problem of punishment is one of the most enduring in political theory” (p. 1). But over the years, punishment theory has been separated from moral and political philosophy more generally. The upshot is that both punishment theory and moral and political philosophy have suffered. To put things right, Matravers avers, any adequate theory of punishment “must be rooted in a broader moral theory, and that broader moral theory will be … constructivist” (p. 1). It is the task of his book to explore why and how this is so.

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).

Nothing energizes a field of study more than a revolution. The explosion of new forms of mass communication is just such a revolution for the field of political communication, to judge by this volume. As its 22 chapters demonstrate, profound changes in the technology and institutions of mass media have prompted a wide-ranging and stimulating effort to document, interpret, and theorize.

For more than a generation, as the authors rightly point out, the impact of organized labor on electoral politics has been neglected in scholarly literature. Indeed, only a tiny minority of social scientists explicitly focuses on organized labor in the United States. Although the impact of the social movements of the 1960s appeared to heighten awareness of the importance of class, race, and gender, class and its organized expression, the union movement, has received less attention, while studies of race and gender have flourished.

Dennis Chong proposes an account of how to forge a merger between rational choice and sociological explanations of the role of norms, values, and symbols in politics. The core idea is that norms and values (not just self-interest) are indeed essential for understanding political choice (as a sociologist would expect), but that norms and values have to develop. Those in place today change over time. And rational choice enters in guiding that evolution.

Sally Cohen has written an important and comprehensive analysis of child-care policy in the United States, challenging the conventional wisdom that no such federal policy exists and that child care is not a major government priority, in contrast to other democratic welfare states (e.g., the Scandinavian countries and France).

From the title one might expect a sequel of sorts to the author's highly regarded On Nationality (1995). The volume is both less and more than that, although mostly more. David Miller has long been critical of the Anglo-American liberal approach to political theory and has advanced his criticism along a number of fronts. To oversimplify, Miller is not a liberal, he is a civic republican; he is not a universalist liberal, he is a nationalist; he is not a liberal democratic, he is a deliberative democrat; he is not an economic liberal, he is a social democrat.

Both the books under review deal with the development of a distinctly American political tradition of liberalism and liberal democracy and its relationship to the thorny issue of racial slavery. However, the authors employ very different means to explore this common goal. While David Ericson, as in his previous work, concentrates on the level of national politics, James Simeone examines the local political culture of “bottomland republicanism” in early Illinois.

Superintending Democracy is a very fine collection of articles about the role of the judicial branch and our electoral system. It is an especially timely book in view of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. However, the book does not focus on that one decision. Rather, the articles run the gamut and cover all the times the courts and electoral politics intertwine.

By the 1970s—and, some might argue, a decade earlier—America had shed its urban persona and had metamorphosed into a suburban nation. Yet in comparison with research done on cities and urban politics, little work had focused on this transition and ensuing suburban politics. Juliet Gainsborough's work seeks to reduce this deficiency by examining the suburban movement, its motivations, and their linkage to political behavior. Thankfully moving beyond previous discussions of mortgages and work commutes, the author narrows the focus of this short monograph to how living in the suburbs affects voter choice and policy preferences by altering the decision-making calculus (p. 8).

George A. Gonzalez has authored a lucid and well-written book with a sharp thesis. He challenges the conventional claim that environmental policy is “an oasis of democracy” by developing a series of case studies to demonstrate that “members of the nation's economic elite—corporate decision-makers and other individuals of substantial wealth—are the dominant influences in the formation and development of U.S. environmental policies” (p. ix). In constructing his theoretical argument, Gonzalez combines G. William Domhoff's method of power structure analysis with James Weinstein's and others' historical analysis of corporate liberalism.

This book argues that the transition from the New Deal to a mobilized wartime economy during World War II restored corporate hegemony in collaboration with a state apparatus dominated by military elites. The purported losers in this transition were New Deal reformers committed to a planned economy and an extensive social welfare state, and groups like labor and small business whose interests were represented by reform elites. Organized chronologically, Waddell's account traces the development of the military-industrial complex from the War Industries Board in World War I to what Waddell asserts is a neocorporatist pattern of governance that had become established by the late 1940s and early 1950s. For the intervening years, he devotes attention to the trade association movement of the 1920s, the National Recovery Administration in the early 1930s, the New Deal turn to Keynesian economics, Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, and the National Security Act of 1947; but the book focuses on the three periods associated with mobilization for World War II. These three periods are prewar mobilization from September, 1939 to December, 1941; the institutionalization of wartime mobilization from early 1942 through early 1943; and the battles over postwar reconversion that began in 1943 and continued into the immediate postwar era.

Hannah Arendt's so-called nostalgia for the Greek polis stands at the core of most readings of her work, especially in debates between proponents of her concept of action as agonistic and interpreters of this concept as associational or communicative. Many feminist theorists, participatory democrats, and liberals share an aversion to Arendt's philhellenism and criticize her machismo, her apparent neglect of Athenian injustice, and her “republicanism,” with its potential for endangering individual autonomy. Similarly, Arendt's emphasis on the political relevance of stories and her self-acknowledged storytelling have also given rise to extensive interpretations. Arendt scholars, in line with many contemporary political theorists, reject the totalizing and universalizing power of theory and argue that human plurality is better expressed in stories than in abstract homogeneous theory. According to them, by exemplifying or illuminating general intuitions and propositions, storytelling concretizes the understanding of politics. They suggest that stories allow the political thinker to be critical and situated. Moreover, stories take into account forgotten parts of history, or forgotten parts of the political sphere, often denied in theories that cannot accept difference and contingency.