Direct Democratic Choice: The Swiss Experience. By Hanspeter Kriesi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 263p. $90.00.

The determinants of the voters' decision in direct democratic votes have received growing attention over the last 15 years. The reasons for this are mainly twofold. First, there has been a sharp increase in the number of popular votes worldwide. In Europe, the successive waves of referenda on the European Union, up to the recent rejection of the EU constitution in France and in the Netherlands, have put the issue of direct democratic choices on the top of both the scientific and political agendas. Second, we have witnessed important theoretical developments in the study of opinion formation and political behavior (e.g., the contributions of social and political psychology with respect to the role of cognitive strategies, or the contributions of communication studies with respect to media and campaign effects).

Democracy and Elections in Africa. By Steffan Lindberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This book is an original, important, and in many ways impressive study that will make a contribution to both electoral and Africanist scholarship. The author's central argument is that repetitive elections (three or more) increase the democratic qualities of regimes and broaden and deepen civil liberties in societies. This argument is carefully placed within democratic theory and rigorously tested by a dense and generally sophisticated empirical analysis, although I have criticisms regarding the tightness of the theory and two variables used in the empirical analysis.

Principles of Constitutional Design. By Donald S. Lutz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 278p. $80.00.

This is a complex, important, original, and unusual work. It should be studied carefully (not simply read) by all those interested in constitutional studies broadly understood. This includes constitutional lawyers (especially those with an interest in comparative constitutional law, and in constitutional design), political theorists of many different stripes, and most notably scholars in comparative politics interested in institutional questions. If in your research or teaching or consulting you rely on the work of Arend Lijphart, you should definitely read this book. You should also read it if you are interested in institutional design more generally.

Rightful Resistance in Rural China. By Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 200 pages. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Studies of contemporary China move between two poles of presentation—richly detailed analyses of phenomena that seem specific to China and more sweeping panaromas that leap to broad generalities without always marking their steps forward clearly. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li offer an insightful study of collective action in contemporary China that successfully steers a course between the typical extremes. Their work is solidly anchored in years of research in the Chinese countryside, where they have conducted interviews and administered surveys, and about which they have read government documents and the press. This work also takes into account the growing amount of scholarship being produced by the Chinese themselves. And most helpful to their efforts of explaining Chinese cases to a broader audience, their analysis consistently engages the literature on collective action conceptualized principally out of studies of advanced industrial societies and the histories of those societies.

Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development. By Conor O'Dwyer. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 278p. $49.95.

This first book by Conor O'Dwyer adds to a growing and impressive collection of works on state building in postcommunist countries. In it he seeks to explain the variation in the growth of large patronage networks in state administrations in three central European countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. In doing so, he looks to the relationship between the establishment of strong party systems and the ability of states to withstand the emergence of extensive patronage networks. Specifically, he posits (p. 13) that “the magnitude and character of administrative expansion is determined by the capacity of party competition to constrain patronage.” He concludes that taking all considerations into account, it is the presence or absence of a strongly competitive party system that most clearly explains the sleek state administrative structures in the Czech Republic and the bloated bureaucracy in Poland and Slovakia. The failure of these two countries, whose leaders had so keenly sought to dismantle the communist nomenklatura system, to gain control of what O'Dwyer calls “runaway state-building” is richly detailed and persuasively argued in this excellent book.

Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic. By Cindy Skach. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 151p. $29.95.

Comparative constitutionalism reigns high on the current academic agenda. Political scientists and legal scholars alike have been displaying a heightened interest in the comparative study of political organization through an analysis of constitutional structures and principles. As such, comparative studies of constitutional law open many new doors and raise new questions. As a result, any new contribution to this fast-growing field will certainly be measured by the degree to which its author can move the analysis along and, importantly, by how much this scholarly enterprise is undertaken and carried out with the awareness of the larger context of comparative constitutionalism.

Global Liberalism, Local Populism: Peace and Conflict in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland. By Guy Ben-Porat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 327p. $19.77.

Guy Ben-Porat's valuable book argues that contemporary globalization may transform conflicts and their resolution since it generates hegemonic crisis and fosters neoliberal interests among international and local players. Hence, interactions between localities and transnational capitalist forces may be a crucial predictor of the ways that conflicts have been managed, resolved, and reproduced. In this context, Global Liberalism, Local Populism analyzes the complexities of two protracted, violent clashes: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland.

Democratic Processes and Financial Markets: Pricing Politics. By William Bernhard and David Leblang. New York: Cambridge University Press 2006. 260p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99.

Imagine contemporary political economy as the electromagnetic spectrum. At one end are very long-run processes, such as the emergence of the political institutions that generate divergence between rich and poor countries in the world economy. At the other end are short-run phenomena, such as the movements in financial markets that we ponder while reading the stock pages with our morning coffee. For the last 10 years, William Bernhard and David Leblang have been exploring this latter end of the spectrum with clarity and rigor, and between them have pretty much defined the standards for the field.

Conflict and Compliance: State Responses to International Human Rights Pressure. By Sonia Cardenas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 188p. $65.00 cloth.

Norms protecting human beings from rights violations are growing, and international human rights pressures, like laws and sanctions, more and more escort them. But states are also subject to competing domestic pressures that make human rights violations attractive to some, and these countervailing forces make the business of compliance a tricky one. What happens when states face global norms to protect human rights but domestic opposition to implementing them? Sonia Cardenas, in her new book, provides an answer worth hearing.

Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. By Daniel H. Deudney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 391p. $35.00.

Among books on international relations theory, this is one of the most important works to be published in recent years. Daniel Deudney synthesizes traditional IR theory with the logic of republican politics, producing a book that is as creative and original as it is erudite and sophisticated.

All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes. By Daniel W. Drezner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 234p. $29.95.

Daniel Drezner begins his book by throwing down a gauntlet: “Globalization is responsible for a lot of bad international relations theory” (p. 3). This assertion caused this reviewer to nod in agreement, but it heightened my expectations for what Drezner would produce. These expectations grew as he identified promulgators of “bad international relations theory,” which ranged from commentators, such as Thomas Friedman, to schools of international relations theory, including realism and liberal institutionalism, but especially theories that privilege the agency of nonstate actors in world politics. By and large, the author met this reader's expectations by crafting a rigorous, robust, and accessible analysis of international regulatory regimes.

Delegation and Agency in International Organizations. Edited by Darren G. Hawkins, David A. Lake, Daniel L. Nielson, and Michael J. Tierney. 424p. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. $80.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

This volume examines and exemplifies the usefulness of principal-agent (P-A) theory for the study of international relations through a set of well-integrated analyses of delegation to international (governmental) organizations (IOs). The editors begin with some useful, explicit definitions of key terms. They define delegation as a revocable “grant of authority” from one or more “principal(s)” to an “agent,” which enables “the latter to act on behalf of the former” in a specified domain and/or for a limited period of time. The agent's discretion in how to pursue the principal's objectives is a direct inverse function of the precision of the rules laid down by the principal. Agent autonomy, by contrast, is defined as the possible range of actions the agent can take contrary to the principal's interests, net whatever mechanism the principal may have put in place to control the agent. To the extent that an agent actually pursues his own interests contrary to the principal's, we see agency slack.

Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response. By Matthew J. Hoffman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 260p. $81.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In this book, Matthew J. Hoffman attempts something quite ambitious: a two-stage analysis in which he first designs a formal model to test Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink's constructivist model of a norms life cycle, and a subsequent application of the insights generated to an empirical case. Although he does not quite pull it off, it is an effort worthy of attention and further development. On a stylistic note, the text contains an irritating amount of repetition that a good copy editor should have questioned.

Playing the Market: A Political Strategy for Uniting Europe, 1985–2005. By Nicolas Jabko. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 206 p. $39.95.

This is an excellent book that deserves a wide audience of political scientists, economists, and policymakers. It is ambitious, insightful, novel, and persuasive and should stand the test of time.

Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. By Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 345p. $35.00.

One inevitable result of the recent U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been renewed scholarly interest in the determinants of wartime public opinion. In a recent influential article, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler (“Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]: 7–46) argue that casualty tolerance is primarily shaped by prospective beliefs about likely success and retrospective judgments regarding the “rightness” of the decision to initiate the conflict. This rationalist account of wartime public opinion suggests that the mass public will accept the costs of war if they are exceeded by attainable and important benefits.

Human Rights in the Global Information Society. Edited by Rikke Frank Jørgensen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 324p. $25.00.

The various authors in this book are activists and scholars associated, in one way or another, with the Human Rights Caucus of the World Summit on the Information Society held in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). They share a “firm commitment to promoting human rights standards as an essential baseline for the assessment and governance of the GIS [global information society]” (p. 7). To that end, the book analyzes how the development of public policy on GIS issues affects the protection and promotion of human rights. How are rights like freedom of expression, to privacy, to freedom from discrimination, and women's rights affected by the rapid spread of the GIS? As the book's introduction suggests, “there is a pressing need to think through how these rights apply in a globally networked and information-intensive world, identify specific policies and practices that could be contrary to their preservation and promotion, and suggest specific reforms that would rectify such problems” (p. 26).

Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics. By Carol Lancaster. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 284p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

This book addresses an important issue—namely, why governments give aid—and offers a comparison of five countries since 1945: the United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Denmark. Each country occupies its own chapter, with systematic comparison being assisted by a common set of headings relating to the main domestic sources of influence: ideas, institutions, interests, and government organization. Two opening chapters set the stage and offer a brief history of aid's purposes. A rather short concluding chapter sums up the findings. No other book has the same agenda. Carol Lancaster's analysis benefits greatly from her position as an “insider” for 13 years on and off in the U.S. government, working on aid issues, and from the opportunity to interview around a hundred aid officials and expert commentators in the five countries during 2002–3.

Deterring International Terrorism and Rogue States: U.S. National Security Policy after 9/11. By James H. Lebovic. New York: Routledge, 2007. 240p. $135.00 cloth, $37.95 paper.

Recent literature on terrorism and so-called “rogue” proliferation states is vast, and James Lebovic's book stands out among the very finest for its original arguments, richly documented presentation, and engaging and thought-provoking discussion. Overall, it is critical of the post-9/11 view dominant in U.S. strategic thinking that the main adversaries are undeterrable. It shows that terrorists and leaders of renegade regimes are neither mindless nor irrational, but rather are often sensitive to the costs of punishment and thus susceptible to the logic of deterrence. Deterrence doctrines should therefore not be abandoned as Cold War relics, and the book makes a remarkable contribution toward bridging the doctrinal issues and debates from the Cold War (nuclear deterrence) past to the current problems of antiproliferation and counterterrorism.

Regime Change: U.S. Strategy Through the Prism of 9/11. By Robert S. Litwak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 424p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Robert Litwak focuses his book on how the United States should respond to the potential post–Cold War proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—especially nuclear weapons—to so-called rogue states and nonstate actors like Al Qaeda. Litwak makes three central arguments: 9/11 transformed America's conception of national security; U.S. policy toward rogue states oscillates between the contradictory objectives of regime change versus behavior change; and in the post–9/11 world, the main security threat to the United States is the nexus of nonstate actors like Al Qaeda that want to acquire WMDs and states that might—either passively or actively—facilitate their acquisition by such organizations.

Power and Principle: Human Rights Programming in International Organizations. By Joel E. Oestreich. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007. 243p. $59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The power of human rights to shape the mandate and operations of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is vividly illustrated in this timely study. Highly readable and original, it holds great appeal for both students and scholars in the fields of international organizations (IOs) and human rights.