Gambling Politics: State Government and the Business of Betting. By Patrick A. Pierce and Donald E. Miller. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. 240p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The traditional wisdom regarding the decision to adopt a lottery was that state policymakers turned to lotteries in an effort to avoid raising taxes. Yet at least one seminal study (Frances Stokes Berry and William Berry, “State Lottery Adoptions as Policy Innovations: An Event History Analysis,” American Political Science Review 84 [1990]: 395–415) suggests that such adoptions are most likely when the fiscal health of the state is relatively strong, among other things. These findings present some interesting and somewhat perplexing questions for those who study the gambling industry. If fiscal health of the state does not have a substantial impact on gambling adoptions, why then are the political battles surrounding those adoptions so often framed in terms of revenues? The revenues generated by even the most successful state lotteries and casinos are relatively small when compared to traditional taxes, such as sales and income tax (with the noteworthy exception of Nevada casinos, which have historically generated substantial portions of that state's total revenue). An important area for policy research is whether casinos are being viewed by states primarily as revenue generators or in some other terms. In the case of casinos, much of the discussion in some states has centered on the economic development possibilities of the casino industry.

Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise. By Andrew Rich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 270p. $65.00.

Scholars and parishioners interested in public policy and the nature and quality of decision making in Washington will find Andrew Rich's first book to be an interesting and valuable contribution to the field. While the book focuses on an often-overlooked set of institutions—public policy research organizations—it also explores the current state of policy advice in Washington. These independent, nonprofit organizations have served our nation well by conducting research, analysis, and debate on a wide range of complex public policy issues. Thinks tanks such as the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the RAND Corporation have helped shape the thinking of policymakers for almost a century. Rich contends that their unique role in the policymaking process is now in peril, and he sets out to document how the sea change that has taken place in American politics is reflected in the changing dynamics in the policymaking community in Washington.

Political Competition: Theory and Applications. By John E. Roemer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 352p. $60.00.

John Roemer sets out to slaughter a golden calf of positive political theory: the Downsian model of electoral competition and its famous implication, the median voter theorem. Roemer contends that not only is the premise of the Downsian model—political parties seeking election without policy objectives of their own—historically incorrect, but it also leads to implausible predictions. Throughout political history, he postulates, parties have represented disparate interests and have advocated divergent policies; thus, a model that is premised on the opposite and predicts convergence as the only equilibrium—provided an equilibrium even exists—cannot be the right tool for analyzing politics.

Is Separate Unequal? Black Colleges and the Challenge to Desegregation. By Albert L. Samuels. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 240p. $34.95.

Does the “affirmative duty” to desegregate, which the Supreme Court found in the public elementary and secondary school cases, extend to higher education systems? If so, what is to be the status of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)? The focal point of this book is the case, United States v. Fordice (1992), in which the Court first addressed this issue. Prior higher-education desegregation cases had dealt with the rights of individual blacks to attend previously all-white state institutions. The author of this valuable volume, Albert Samuels, notes that “the Fordice ruling probably raised more questions than it answered” (p. 3). This book is an erudite exploration of some of these unanswered questions.

The City at Stake: Secession, Reform and the Battle for Los Angeles. By Raphael J. Sonenshein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 328p. $39.50.

Unlike any other city in recent years, Los Angeles has been the subject of grand theorizing in urban studies, so much so that many write of an “L.A. school” of urban theory. With its sprawl, smog, postindustrial economy, and postmodern architecture, this California city is often presented as an ideal-type representation of urbanized, globalized dystopia. While some of the studies of the L.A. school are useful, they are too often impressionistic and imprecise, pitched at an unsatisfying level of abstraction. In contrast, Raphael Sonenshein's detailed and empirical study is a useful and refreshing antidote, and when paired alongside his 1993 book, Politics in Black and White, serves as the definitive account of the city's political history since the 1970s.

Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared. Edited by Christopher K. Ansell and Guiseppe di Palma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 316p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

This interesting and thought-provoking book, based on a cross-national research project involving both U.S. and European scholars, provides a sustained meditation on the “restructuring of territoriality” in both the United States and the European Union. From initial starting points, such as John Ruggie's “unbundling of territoriality” and other writing on the challenges to the modern state system, from domestic privatization to globalization, the authors focus on the contemporary challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state and the rebundling of territoriality associated with the development of the EU, reflecting a central concern with how the relationship between territory and governance is changing.

The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization. By Ariel C. Armony. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 312p. $55.00.

Ariel Armony's work provides a useful corrective to some of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of civil society, associationism, social capital, and “the third sector.” In particular, the crude claim that is sometimes made—namely, that high membership in voluntary associations leads uniquely to a higher quality of democracy—is roundly and justly criticized. “Civil society may or may not lead to democracy,” the author claims, “because what matters is the context in which people associate, not because association is inherently and universally positive for democracy” (p. 2).

Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Edited by Henry E. Brady and David Collier. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 384p. $72.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This essay collection is an exceptionally important book that establishes a pluralistic vision of social science methodology. Until a few years ago, the discipline equated methods with quantitative methods and formal modeling; qualitative research was often seen as lacking precision and rigor and therefore as undeserving of the “methods” label. How things have changed—and for the better! The American Political Science Association now has a flourishing section on Qualitative Methods, which has attracted a rapidly increasing membership.

Gender and Human Rights Politics in Japan: Global Norms and Domestic Networks. By Jennifer Chan-Tiberghien. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 240p. $45.00.

This is an admirably constructed book. It is clear, concise, and forceful, with good evidence and examples that illustrate observations and arguments. It is also a book that challenges many of the conventional paradigms of the study of Japanese politics. One of the tenacious tenets of the paradigms is that Japanese society, Japanese politics, and Japanese culture are resistant to forces coming from outside and that they try to keep their organic whole with cohesion and consistency. Jennifer Chan-Tiberghien says no, at least not always yes, to this conventional wisdom.

The Formation of National Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great Britain, India and the United States. By Pradeep K. Chhibber and Ken Kollman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. 272p. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The question of the role institutions play in party aggregation has tended to be dominated by discussions of the role and effects of different electoral systems. In a refreshing change from this preoccupation with electoral systems, Pradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman turn our attention to the impact of federalism, or, more appropriately, the degree of centralization or devolution of power in governmental systems, on the fragmentation of party systems. Their focus is dynamic: They are interested in the formation of national party systems and in how party systems change over time with respect to their extent of nationalization and in relation to the migration of political authority to the center or from the center to states, provinces, or regions. Highly nationalized party systems are ones in which parties receive similar vote shares across different levels of vote aggregation: district, regional, and national. Conversely, in weakly nationalized party systems, parties are differentially competitive across levels.

Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change. Edited by Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 304p. $24.95.

Latin America's indigenous peoples' social movements are gaining increasing attention from political scientists. Once the exclusive interest of anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, by the 1990s political scientists could no longer ignore the implications of the emergence of regional, national, and international indigenous political actors for the development of democracy and the state. By the end of the decade, political scientists had produced a handful of scholarly books on indigenous peoples' politics (e.g., Alison Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village: Indian Rights and International Relations in Latin America, 2000; Donna Lee Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America, 2000; Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge, 2005) and many other comparative and monographic studies are in the publishing pipeline or at the dissertation stage.

Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies. By Russell J. Dalton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 230p. $45.00.

Russell Dalton has written an impressive, thoughtful, and useful comparative analysis of the origins, character, and consequences of variations in public support for a number of advanced industrial democracies, all of them long-term (since 1960) member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Following David Easton's landmark study (A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 1965), Dalton distinguishes three broad objects of political support—political communities, political regimes, and political authorities—and two types of support, diffuse and specific. These are operationalized by the author in Table 2.1. Most of his empirical data are derived from a variety of National Election Studies in member states, as well as World Value and Eurobarometer surveys. The book is organized in three parts.

Politics Beyond the Capital: The Design of Subnational Institutions in South America. By Kent Eaton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 288p. $55.00.

This is a good book about an interesting and important subject: waves of centralizing and decentralizing change over time and across four different country cases. The book analyzes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay from the nineteenth century to the present. More specifically, Kent Eaton examines 30 periods of movement toward greater or lesser centralization—12 in Argentina, 6 in Brazil, 5 in Chile, and 7 in Uruguay.

The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal. By Dennis C. Galvan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 331p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Oral history among the Serer ethnic group in western Senegal suggests that a heroic itinerant ancestor founded the community in a parcel of land he cleared by setting fire to the brush and the forest. This original fire is the source of the authority over claims to control and use the land that became institutionalized in the inheritable office now widely known by the title of laman (the “master of fire”). With the commodification of the economy under colonial rule, the introduction of a new land tenure system, and the creation of elected rural councils for local management of land tenure by the postcolonial government, the state has replaced the lamans as the master of fire. This history provides the fascinating title and the substantive focus of Dennis Galvan's interesting book that addresses theoretically important and empirically relevant issues concerning the relative impact of structure and agency on the choice of new institutions, the resulting impact of embedded institutions on social and economic development, and, more broadly, the relationship among institutions, culture, and development.

Making Sense of Governance: Empirical Evidence from 16 Developing Countries. By Goran Hyden, Julius Court, and Kenneth Mease. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 262p. $55.00.

This is an unusual and intriguing book. It is both erudite and exploratory (as the authors acknowledge), brilliant in conception, and problematic in execution. It is based on the results of the World Governance Survey (WGS) of “well-informed people” (WIPs), such as high-ranking civil servants, long-standing parliamentarians, businesspeople, academics, and so on. At least 35 WIPs were surveyed in each of the 16 developing countries in the study. No one can doubt the importance of the topic that Goran Hyden, Julius Court, and Kenneth Mease address, particularly given the increasing prominence that it occupies in development theory and practice. The authors define governance as “the rules that regulate the public realm” (p. 16). They rightly seek to give badly needed analytical depth to its study.

Procedural Politics: Issues, Influence, and Institutional Choice in the European Union. By Joseph Jupille. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $80.00.

According to Joseph Jupille, “procedural politics” extracts from the European Union's policymaking process the conflicts and maneuvers regarding which of the EU institutions will have a say in which policy decisions, and how important that say will be. Ordinary procedural politics are of considerable importance, and the case studies the author presents give us an excellent picture of the coalition building and conflict resolution that goes on among the member states' ministers, the Commission officials, and the leaders and committees of the European Parliament. The cases go into considerable depth and display procedural politics in a fascinating variety of forms. Procedural politics among the EU institutions regard how issues are defined in order to be classified according to the varying treaty-defined competences of the Council of Ministers, the Commission, and the European Parliament. But ordinary procedural politics goes on in a time frame that is bounded by new treaty rules as to what procedures will be applicable to what policy issues. In ordinary procedural politics, that is, during periods in between Treaty revisions, the Commission can employ a variety of strategies and tactics to keep Council members on its side or else in conflict with one another short of the point where division means stalemate. As it has gained in power via treaty revisions, the Parliament can be expected to win something from these battles, sometimes on its own, at other times in alliance with the Commission.

The Moral Economy of Welfare States: Britain and Germany Compared. By Steffen Mau. New York: Routledge, 2003. 248p. $114.95.

As postwar welfare state accords unraveled in the 1970s, welfare state scholarship grew rapidly, with most scholars aiming to identify the determinants of policy variation and growth. Scholars typically debated the relative roles of economic and demographic factors, political configurations, and national attitudes and preferences. In subsequent decades, many researchers turned their attention from the determinants of welfare state development to the effects of social policies on varied social, economic, and behavioral outcomes. At the same time, a number of scholars moved away from social expenditures as the primary measure of welfare state effort and aimed instead to analyze the institutional features, or the architecture, of public provisions. Furthermore, scholars began to argue that the welfare state's causes and effects were, in fact, multidirectional. Welfare state features shape socioeconomic outcomes, political alliances, and preferences, and in turn are shaped and maintained by their own effects.

Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. By Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 348p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart tackle two pressing empirical and theoretical questions about religion and politics: Why have most wealthy countries become less religious, and why have most poor countries become more religious? Their answer will be no surprise to those who have followed Inglehart's research over the years: The socioeconomic and external security conditions in which people grow up strongly affect their propensity to be religious. Those who were socialized during conditions of “existential security” have less need for religion; those whose formative years were marked by conditions of insecurity (to themselves, their families, or their communities) have much more need for religion. As with Inglehart's earlier work on postindustrial values (The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics, 1977), the main variable is socioeconomic well-being and security when young.

Community-Driven Regulation: Balancing Development and the Environment in Vietnam. By Dara O'Rourke. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. 288p. $62.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The prevailing assumption among scholars and policymakers alike is that developing countries have a poor track record when it comes to environmental protection. Dara O'Rourke challenges this assumption through the lens of six extremely well researched case studies of environmental regulation in Vietnam. Specifically, his book is motivated by the puzzle that despite Vietnam's rapid integration into the global economy, weak state capacities, and the promotion of industrialization over environmental protection, effective environmental regulation has emerged. O'Rourke argues that local communities are spearheading environmental protection in Vietnam, and precisely because environmental protection has emerged as a bottom-up effort, which he terms “community-driven regulation” (CDR), Vietnam may be better posed to balance development with environmental concerns.

Picking Winners: From Technology Catch-up to the Space Race in Japan. By Saadia Pekkanen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 304 pages, $45.00.

The purpose of this book is to use the postwar Japanese political-economic experience to answer a question that has divided Japan and other Asian scholars for over two decades, namely, how governments choose which industries to favor. This is an important question for both intellectual and policy reasons. Indeed, answering this question will help determine which of two very different points of view better explains Japan's postwar trajectory and will assist the governments of the developing world to design and enact policies that best serve their economic development goals. Saadia Pekkanen addresses this question with a rich variety of quantitative and qualitative data, the former captured in an expanded data set that breaks down the Japanese economy and trade and industrial policy tools by two-digit economic sectors, and the latter involving short case discussions of specific industrial sectors and an extended case study of the commercial space industry.