Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time. By William Scheuerman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 312p. $42.00.

While the political ramifications of social acceleration have preoccupied thinkers in a variety of disciplines at least since the Industrial Revolution, and contemporary works by such thinkers as Paul Virilio, David Harvey, James Der Derian, and William Connolly have highlighted various modes of speed, many in political science have been slow to pay heed. William Scheuerman's book aims to redress this lag in the discipline, taking up the theme of social acceleration from these and other authors and using it to frame a wide-ranging assessment of transformations to liberal democratic legal and political institutions.

Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability. By R. Douglas Arnold. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 304p. $35.00.

R. Douglas Arnold sets an ambitious goal: “This book is the first large-scale study of how local media outlets cover members of Congress” (pp. 3–4). His ultimate success exemplifies how content analysis can illuminate a subject with empirical and systematic findings.

The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. By Richard Franklin Bensel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Richard Bensel has written a fascinating book on a timely subject, the nature of polling places in the United States at the juncture between the second and third party systems. His cogent description of how balloting actually took place raises provocative questions about the interpretation of nineteenth-century elections, the development of modern democracy, and the dilemmas inherent in electoral institutions.

Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America. By Adam J. Berinsky. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 224p. $35.00.

Polls, Adam Berinsky warns, are flawed. The source of this flaw is what he labels “exclusion bias,” defined as “the exclusion of the preferences of the sometimes sizable portion of the public who say they ‘don't know’ where they stand on the issues of the day” (p. 2).

Expressive Politics: Issue Strategies of Congressional Challengers. By Robert G. Boatright. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 280p. $44.95.

In an era in which fewer and fewer congressional elections are competitive, why do candidates emerge at all to challenge entrenched incumbents who typically preside over very safe districts? In this book, Robert Boatright provides us with an explanation for this phenomenon. Not all challengers think they have a chance at beating the incumbent; in fact, most are quite aware that they will almost certainly lose and lose big in the general election. Furthermore, because these candidates are not running to win the election, they tend to run different campaigns, many of which are focused on highlighting certain issues and expressing certain political points of view. This is what the author means by “expressive politics.”

Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists. By Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Bradford S. Jones. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 232p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

The study of durations in political science has been on the rise over the last decade and a half. Their application spans major research questions in virtually every field, including the duration of parliamentary governments, international conflict, policy adoptions in the U.S. states, and issue emergence in campaigns. Testing theoretical arguments regarding these and other questions involving durations has led political scientists to learn about and rely upon statistical models for durations, often referred to as event history models. Perhaps more than models for other classes of data, learning about event history models, particularly those for continuous-time data, presents a formidable task. This is partly due to the unique language of the models (e.g., terms like “spell,” “failure,” “frailty,” and “hazard”) that developed through their application in other disciplines, but also because of the new concerns that they involve. For example, how should one control for duration dependence? Is the proportional hazards assumption met?

After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation. By Charles T. Clotfelter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 216p. $24.95.

Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte. By Stephen Samuel Smith. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 246p. $86.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Charles Clotfelter was moved to write his book because he discovered that his students at Duke had no real appreciation of the intense struggle to end racial isolation in public schools begun by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. He felt some urgency in laying out the historical record since there were strong indications that contemporary schools were becoming resegregated. After Brown focuses on “interracial contact,” the physical proximity of the races in schools, because it is the necessary intermediary for all other potential benefits, including educational achievement, self-esteem, attitudes, and long-term social and economic success.

Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States. By Carolyn E. Cocca. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 228p. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In her book, Carolyn Cocca takes on an ambitious topic of a relatively sensitive nature—the politics of sexuality, gender, and morality in the context of statutory rape laws. Cocca recognizes the nature of her task from the start. She opens the preface with a discussion of the reaction of others to her research—comments by colleagues questioning her own beliefs about the topic and the implied notion that her interest must somehow be inherently political or personal. Such is the reaction of most social scientists to those who study the politics of sexuality.

Reviewing Delegation: An Analysis of the Congressional Reauthorization Process. By James H. Cox. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. 176p. $49.95.

A core debate in the bureaucratic politics literature concerns the extent to which the president and Congress can exert control over the federal bureaucracy in order to shape the direction of public policy. James Cox's book analyzes congressional reauthorization power across numerous federal agencies to expand scholarly knowledge about congressional control of the bureaucracy. Reauthorization is a policy tool that allows Congress to reassess the status of existing policy. Theoretically, this tool allows Congress to prevent the president and the federal bureaucracy from drifting away from the original intent of legislation. However, Cox explains that Congress often proceeds with extreme caution when deciding whether to use this policy tool, because limited resources prevent it from monitoring all of the implementation activities of federal agencies. Therefore, Congress must consider the numerous costs and benefits associated with providing a federal agency with permanent or temporary authorization.

Affirmative Action Is Dead; Long Live Affirmative Action. By Faye J. Crosby. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 352p. $30.00.

Through an informative professional literature review, Faye Crosby intends to educate affirmative action critics and a skeptical public about the real-life operation of and continuing need for a largely misunderstood social policy. Her book's key question is “why does the policy of affirmative action which appears reasonable to many social scientists attract so much negative comment?” (p. 22). Despite confusion with illegal quotas and with the Supreme Court's newly minted diversity justification, Crosby is convinced that social science studies prove that properly implemented affirmative action is largely beneficial and still necessary to overcome overt or subtle in-group prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion.

Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America. By George C. Edwards III. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. 224p. $26.00.

George Edwards has filled the breech created by the recent death of Lawrence Longley as a powerful voice within political science opposing the electoral college. In the foreword, Longley's longtime associate, Neal Peirce, notes that one of the great puzzles of the 2000 presidential election was that it failed to prompt a massive public outcry against the system that elevated George W. Bush to the presidency, despite Al Gore's 539,893 positive margin in popular votes. Another great puzzle is the lack of any consensus among political scientists on the issue, as described in Choosing a President (2002), edited by Burdett Loomis and myself.

Passing the Buck: Congress, the Budget, and Deficits. By Jasmine Farrier. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 296p. $40.00.

Has Congress, in recent years, repeatedly transferred its budgetary powers to the president in response to huge deficits and other fiscal challenges? Jasmine Farrier argues forcefully that it has. Looking at a number of case studies of congressional budget reform since 1974, she claims that Congress has delegated significant constitutional authority to the executive branch. In particular, she examines the legislative histories of the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act, the 1985 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act (Gramm-Rudman-Hollings), the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, and the 1996 Line-Item Veto Act to make her case. Torn between constituent demands for federal funds and their obligation to make responsible national budget policy, Farrier concludes, members have attacked their own branch, giving away power, begging to “stop us before we spend again.”

Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy. By Archon Fung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 336p. $39.50.

The United States harbors the hope that participation can improve policy. In January 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton discussed with General William Sherman how to resettle tens of thousands of freed people on the abandoned plantations of the Sea Islands, near Savannah. They included 20 African American religious and civic leaders in their deliberations that produced the short-lived 40-acres policy. Stanton suggested that the process of this decision, as well as its content, would “electrify the nation.” David Lilienthal suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a brand new method of government in the manner in which it included the “grass roots” in the process of electrification. The War on Poverty brought with it an emphasis on maximum feasible participation that Daniel Moynihan explained was part third rail and part poorly devised policy.

The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics. By Richard Johnston, Michael G. Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 216p. $55.00 cloth, $19.99 paper.

The 2000 presidential election in the United States provides Richard Johnston, Michael Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson with a “natural experiment” to investigate the dynamics of support for George W. Bush and for Al Gore over the course of the campaign. As we all know, the 2000 election gave somewhat contradictory results: a popular majority for one candidate and an Electoral College majority for the other. Further, the campaign had two distinct elements that these researchers capitalize on for their work—the nationwide news coverage provided by the mass media and the campaign ads running on television chiefly, if not exclusively, in the battleground states. Given the difference between the forecasts provided by previously reliable models of presidential campaigns and the actual outcome of the 2000 contest, Johnston et al. ask whether campaign dynamics may account for the disparity.

The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, but Join Much Less. By Seymour Martin Lipset and Noah M. Meltz with Rafael Gomez and Ivan Katchanovski. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 240p. $32.50.

This short book asks excellent questions and presents interesting results from a survey of Canadian and U.S. attitudes toward unions, as well as useful data on union membership, but its explanation of the contrasting trajectories of organized labor on either side of the border is unconvincing. The core problem is Seymour Lipset and Noah Meltz's cultural theory that the two countries have different political and social value foundations—“social democratic” Canada and “libertarian” America—which do not change but explain the post-1964 divergence of union membership in the two countries.

The Republican South: Democratization and Partisan Change. By David Lublin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 272p. $35.00.

David Lublin's book attempts to describe and explain partisan change in the South. It examines the growth of Republicanism across the full range of elected offices, from president down to county officials, and investigates the role that issues, elites, and electoral arrangements have played in the political transformation of the South. This is an ambitious agenda for a book of fewer than 280 pages, but for the most part the author pulls it off. Lublin's success in covering such a broad topic is accomplished in part by relying on previously published work (some of which is his own). Thus, the book is partly a synthesis of existing work, but it also includes new data and analysis.

Politics, Persuasion, and Educational Testing. By Lorraine M. McDonnell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 264p. $45.00.

People who are experts in policy areas, but attempt to write for a broader audience in their home discipline, often write primarily a policy tract, then add a little something from their home field. Although Lorraine McDonnell is one of the top experts in the country on education policy, especially large-scale educational reform, she has written this book truly from the perspective of political science. In her career, she has written many other articles and books concentrating on policy issues and evaluations, but Politics, Persuasion, and Educational Testing is set within the discourse of policy theory and focuses on the politics of educational standards, assessment, and testing.

Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy. By Julie A. Mertus. New York: Routledge, 2004. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In her timely book, Julie Mertus argues that the United States is one of the world's leading architects and promoters of international human rights. However, the United States, much like an unscrupulous car dealer, “uses its wealth and influence to mislead other states about its commitment to the human rights framework, appearing as universalist when actually it is applying double-standards” (p. 210). In other words, the United States relies on one set of human rights standards for itself and another set of standards to judge other states. Mertus starts out her project hoping to discover that human rights norms have become “deeply embedded,” “institutionalized,” or “internalized” into the U.S. foreign policy framework. Instead, she finds that both the executive branch and the Defense Department routinely override human rights concerns in favor of instrumental foreign policy gains. This American exceptionalism or exemptionalism of excusing itself from institutions and norms that it establishes and purports to follow has prevented human rights norms from fully embedding themselves into U.S. foreign policy. Mertus points to an inherent ambivalence and structural inability of the United States to actually follow through on its very own human rights goals. She finds some evidence to suggest that it indeed does respect and value human rights, but there is strong counterevidence to suggest that it is not able to actually translate human rights aspirations to meaningful policies.

Politics from Anarchy to Democracy: Rational Choice in Political Science. Edited by Irwin L. Morris, Joe A. Oppenheimer, and Karol Edward Soltan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 256p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

This is a collection of papers from a lecture series sponsored by the Collective Choice Center at the University of Maryland's Department of Government and Politics. What makes the book different from the usual volume of papers is that the editors have sought to turn the papers into a kind of text for an introductory courses on rational choice political theory, and it seems to me with a good deal of success. The papers are organized under three headings dealing with origins of the state, design of institutions, and conditions for democracy. But before the lecture-based papers, two of the editors provide an extensive Introduction surveying the field (Irwin Morris and Joe Oppenheimer). The editors then also provide separate introductions to the three groups of papers, which comment on the papers in the wider context of comment on related work by authors not directly represented. The volume concludes with a survey discussion by the third editor (Karol Soltan), commenting on recent debates over the defining characteristics of rational choice theory and indeed over the very idea of rational choice political theory. The technical level is modest (some simple algebra and geometry), which is entirely right for the occasion: not too demanding and not too trivial. But the individual papers often reference work and employ terms and notions that go well beyond what is explicitly developed in the introductory materials. An instructor using the volume needs a confident command of the literature.

Constitutional Deliberation in Congress: The Impact of Judicial Review in a Separated System. By J. Mitchell Pickerill. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 208p. $74.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

J. Mitchell Pickerill's richly layered book shows the possibilities and limits of “constitutional deliberation” in Congress, defined as “reflection and debate over the scope of federal powers under the Constitution in the context of legislation” (p. 11). Pickerill says that such institutional introspection is rare until Congress is confronted with activist majorities on the Supreme Court, as witnessed in the beginning and end of the twentieth century. But even when using constitutional deliberation to rescue stricken laws and protect future ones, Congress incorporates, rather than “overrides,” the latest judicial doctrine on the proper balance of power between the federal government and the states. He compares the use and specter of judicial review to a presidential veto and concludes that such Congress–Court dynamics show bargaining and compromise. However, interpretive equality is not necessary in this view of a healthy separation-of-powers system.