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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change. By Nelson W. Polsby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 257p. $29.95.

A new work on Congress by one of the most prominent scholars of American government in the past half century is a major event. In this book, Nelson Polsby revisits the U.S. House, a subject on which he authored two major articles in the late 1960s (“The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62 [March 1968]: 144–68; and Nelson W. Polsby, Miriam Gallaher, and Barry S. Rundquist, “The Growth of the Seniority System in the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 63 [September 1969]: 707–807). Observing the contemporary House in this volume, Polsby finds a chamber transformed. The “permanent” Democratic majority has been broken, the “solidly” Democratic South now sends a Republican majority to the House, committee chairs are subordinate to the party leadership, and levels of party voting are at their highest since the 1890s.

Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty. By Judith Russell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 244p. $62.50 cloth, $24.50 paper.

The question Judith Russell asks in her book is why the War on Poverty did not include an assault on adult unemployment. The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, the centerpiece of the War, chiefly provided service and education programs for children and youth. Russell believes that only “jobs programs” for adults could have cured poverty. With them, the emerging problem of black joblessness might have been forestalled. Without them, she asserts, the War failed, leading to a conservative era where poverty persists.

Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes. By Ann-Marie E. Szymanski. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 344p. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In this book, Ann-Marie Szymanski achieves what may have been an unintended goal: She demonstrates that the success of a social movement that seeks transformative public policy depends on both the development of flexible, highly adaptative strategies for local reforms and the emergence of opportune conditions for the consolidation of local successes into national—in this case, constitutional—reform. Her study of Prohibition politics and organizational strategies crafted over time brings together insights from new institutionalists who explain how the unique interests of governmental agencies and “states” shape policy outcomes, as well as from political scientists whose studies on the relationships between ideologies, political strategies, and small group dynamics have generated varied pressures for policy reform. If the social movement theorists pay attention to this study, they will enlarge their perspectives, build more sophisticated models, do more comprehensive research, and explain more fully and accurately how social movements actually generate successful political reforms.

Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life. By Katherine Cramer Walsh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 264p. $57.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

Casual conversations that take place among groups of acquaintances can have significant implications for political identity formation. The core thesis of this impressive study by Katherine Cramer Walsh maintains that small groups work collectively to create social contexts that influence members' understanding of politics. Individuals develop perspective through their identification and experiences with a group. She argues that people's ability to engage in “oppositional processing” by juxtaposing their own social position to that of others shapes their political outlook. Race, not political ideology, is the most salient influence on political judgment.

White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community. By Ronald W. Walters. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. 360p. $49.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Ronald W. Walters dislikes the direction that race relations have taken in the present-day United States. In his book, he portrays race relations as a war between the radical conservative wing of the Republican Party and blacks. It goes without saying which group has been losing. It is a story told quite starkly with few nuances or nagging caveats—as the title suggests. The reader feels immediately the depth of Walters's anguish, and the strength of his argument builds as he lays out example after example.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation. By Dmitry P. Gorenburg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 312p. $75.00.

Dmitry Gorenburg has written a most useful book on the subject of minority ethnic mobilization within the Russian Federation during the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin periods. Gorenburg sets out clearly the aims underlying his ambitious study. The book, he writes, “seeks to explain how state institutions affect ethnic mobilization,” through a focusing on the upsurge of nationalist sentiment that took place in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s (p. xi). In addition, the book also intends to challenge the widely held perception that “governing elites can kindle latent ethnic grievances virtually at will” and “to shift the study of ethnic mobilization from the whys of its emergence to the hows of its development as a political force” (p. xi). (It is unclear, at least to this reviewer, why the “whys” are not equally as important as the “hows”: Both questions, one would think, need to be carefully addressed by specialists.) In answering the “how” question, Gorenburg argues that “The nature of these processes … is determined by the ethnic and political institutions established by the state” (p. xii).

The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876–1929. By Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 408p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Stephen Haber, Armando Razo, and Noel Maurer provide a detailed, theoretically rich examination of the interplay between political chaos and economic growth in Mexico. Why did Mexico's economy continue to grow through a series of civil wars, coups, and outside interventions? More generally, what conditions lead to robust growth under political instability? Political scientists, economists, and others have searched for, and failed to find, a consistent link between political instability and economic failure. These authors develop an argument on the conditions under which instability and robust economic growth go hand in hand, using the years before, during, and after Mexico's chaotic revolution as their case study.

Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. By Ran Hirschl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 294p. $49.95.

To the various systems of government known to political science we may now add another—“juristocracy.” Although not rigorously defined in this book, the term refers to a process of judicial empowerment in which judiciaries take on powers and responsibilities previously exercised by representative institutions. While there is little new in recognizing that courts often make decisions with profound political consequences, this study considers recent transfers of power to judiciaries to be unprecedented in their breadth and scope, features of what the author describes as “the new constitutionalism.”

Authoritarian Legacies and Democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe. Edited by Katherine Hite and Paola Cesarini. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 360p. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to the role of antecedent authoritarian regimes to understand the many new democracies that have emerged around the world. This volume seeks to contribute to this discussion by introducing the concept of “authoritarian legacies” as a new analytic lens. The goal of the volume is specifically to show how a focus on authoritarian legacies offers fresh insights into the workings of contemporary democracies in Southern Europe and Latin America.

Fujimori's Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America. By Charles D. Kenney. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 379p. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

In this book on Peruvian politics, Charles Kenney leaves few stones unturned in analyzing the various factors that led to the suspension of the country's constitution and the disbanding of the legislature by President Alberto Fujimori in April 1992. While I am not entirely convinced that this particular episode in Peruvian politics warrants the book-length treatment that it has received here, Kenney has done a commendable job of locating Peru's “autogolpe” (or civilian-inflicted coup) within the broader literature on the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America.