Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works. By Frank M. Bryan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 312p. $49.00 cloth, $19.00 paper.

This book joins a small number of empirical studies about direct democracy and, specifically, the town meeting. Frank M. Bryan is author, coauthor, or editor of 11 books, including Politics in the Rural States (1981) and The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989). Here, he unveils an incredible set of discoveries that fills a major gap in the literature on democracy and the town meeting. Other prominent scholars who have tackled some of these salient issues are Joseph Zimmerman (The New England Town Meeting, 1999) and Jane J. Mansbridge (Beyond Adversary Democracy, 1980), both of whose works are referenced extensively in Real Democracy.

How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State.

Sovereign Nations, Carnal States. By Kam Shapiro. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 208p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Kam Shapiro's book is part of a larger literature of radical political theory whose inspiration can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza as read by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, and richly translated into the terms of political theory by William E. Connolly, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Brian Massumi, among others. Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001), Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), and Connolly's Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002) are among recent works that provide a context for the studies that Shapiro presents here, for each of them develops concepts for what is taken to be a newly emerging and unprecedented arrangement of society. With the new arrangement of things, “political somatics”—to use a phrase that Shapiro borrows from Terry Eagleton—becomes central to decision making and the exercise of power, even as these might appear to have been overwhelmed by the less tangible, more “virtual” phenomena of global communications. The study of embodiment, of what politics does to the body and how the body defines the political, takes on central importance.

Appointing Central Bankers: The Politics of Monetary Policy in the United States and the European Monetary Union.

Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics. By Steven B. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 256p. $35.00.

Steven Smith's book is not only an approachable and engaging interpretation of one of the most difficult philosophical works—Spinoza's Ethics—but an exemplary manifestation of philosophical exegesis. It gracefully positions Spinoza within the ongoing discussion that still constitutes the modernity that forms and informs us. Smith wants to position him within the tradition of modern political philosophy as one of the first to think through the prerequisites for modern, secular, democratic life and what is required morally and psychologically of a modern democratic individual. I would suggest, however, that in the end it is possible that the author comes just as close to positioning Spinoza as a proto-postmodern in the mode of Nietzsche or Heidegger.

The Politics of Child Support in America. By Jocelyn Elise Crowley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 217p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

Jocelyn Crowley argues that child support policy is an example of innovation through entrepreneurial activity over time. Relying on secondary and original sources, she identifies four different sets of entrepreneurs—social workers, conservatives, women legislators/women's groups, and fathers' rights groups. Crowley claims that over the long term, policies continuously evolve and actors enter, exit, and reenter the political arena. Policy entrepreneurs are the central actors who create policy change. She defines policy entrepreneurs as people who are alert to new opportunities, persist in advocating their ideas, and employ rhetorical ingenuity to frame their ideas in novel ways (p. 8). Groups, as well as individuals, have these entrepreneurial characteristics. Changes in child support policy, in the author's view, can be explained by changes in the domination of the political arena of different entrepreneurial groups.

The Prophetic Pulpit: Clergy, Churches, and Communities in American Politics.

On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit. By George C. Edwards, III. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 320p. $35.00.

The funeral of Ronald Reagan marked a celebration not only of the president's political accomplishments but also of the idea that the core of presidential leadership is mastery of the bully pulpit. Published shortly after Reagan was laid to rest, Bill Clinton's autobiography also reflects our modern preoccupation with rhetorical leadership. Clinton credits many of his political victories—most notably fending off an impeachment charge—to the power of rhetorical appeals. He also attributes many of his failures to an inability to communicate effectively. George Edwards thinks that Reagan, Clinton, and the conventional wisdom they exemplify are just plain wrong. In a thorough and forcefully articulated study, Edwards argues that public opinion is never altered by presidential speech. Efforts to advance a president's political agenda through rhetorical appeals over the heads of Congress to the people are futile wastes of time and energy.

Modern Social Imaginaries. By Charles Taylor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 232p. $64.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Few contemporary thinkers can match the diversity, quantity, and quality of work produced by Charles Taylor. At the center of this corpus has been his work on Western modernity, the most important effort of which being his 1989 opus, Sources of the Self. Fifteen years later, Taylor has now published the first installment of a new, related, but distinct study of Western modernity.

Voting for Women: How the Public Evaluates Women Candidates.

Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People. By Scott L. Althaus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 384p. $75.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

The central theme of this book deals with the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality as expressed in opinion surveys. Scott Althaus finds that political knowledge does matter. In addition, the way that knowledge is distributed in society has an important impact on how one should interpret the collective preferences of the public, particularly when assessing the role of the less knowledgeable.

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. By Robert M. Entman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 200p. $16.00.

Which news frames prevail in the coverage of U.S. foreign policy? Robert Entman introduces a “cascading activation” model to explain news framing—“the process of selecting and enhancing some aspects of a perceived reality, and enhancing the salience of an interpretation and evaluation of that reality” (p. 5). According to the cascade model, news frames flow hierarchically, from the White House to Washington elites to the media—although they may also flow directly from the administration to the media—and then to the public. Whereas the “indexing” model holds that news reflects the homogeneity of Washington elites, Entman's model has political communication going both ways: Presidential administrations and Washington elites (congressmen, ex-government officials, lobbyists, academic experts) are guided and constrained by the news (actual or anticipated), just as news organizations tailor the news according to public opinion (actual or anticipated). Because different news frames activate different thoughts and feelings at each stage of the process (p. 9), some frames succeed better than others.

The Green Agenda in American Politics: New Strategies for the Twenty-First Century.

Point, Click, & Vote: The Future of Internet Voting. By R. Michael Alvarez and Thad E. Hall. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. 204p. $46.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The Politics of Internet Communication. By Robert J. Klotz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 280p. $60.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Arguments against remote Internet voting typically point to concerns over access and security. Despite the growth of the medium over the past decade, sizable portions of the U.S. population still lack home access. Moreover, the patterns of Internet access generally reflect the patterns of voter participation in the country; higher income, higher educated, and white citizens connect to the medium and vote at the highest rates. Therefore, the introduction of remote Internet voting likely would reinforce current participatory inequities. The other major concern, security, challenges the fitness of Internet voting even if the United States achieves universal access. Denial-of-service attacks and viruses may disrupt the transmission of ballots, and hackers may change votes already cast by getting past the system's fail-safe mechanisms. In short, most policy reviews agree that the time for remote Internet voting has not yet arrived; federal and state governments should focus their near- and medium-term developmental initiatives on electronic voting or secure kiosk Internet voting, rather than on remote Internet voting.

Choosing Your Battles: American Civil–Military Relations and the Use of Force. By Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 236p. $37.50.

The book addresses two practical and timely research concerns: the existence and significance of differences between civilian and military opinions on the commitment and nature of military force. Quantitative (mostly survey data from the Triangle Institute for Security Studies) and qualitative (case studies) data are used to systematically measure opinions about military operations among the civilian and military elites and the public, and to correlate these with national security decisions from 1819 to 1992. The authors anticipate most questions that could be raised about their methods and identify caveats and research questions yet to be addressed. Choosing Your Battles makes both scholarly contributions and intuitive sense.