Social Movements and Organization Theory. Edited by Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 452p. $80.00 cloth, $36.99 paper.

Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. By Frances Fox Piven. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 200p. $21.95.

These two books, both important additions to the social movement literature, represent two traditions at theoretical odds. Frances Fox Piven's new book is an authoritative, updated restatement of Piven and Richard Cloward's classic thesis that it is not lasting organization but fleeting and overwhelming mass disruption—literally, “the mob” in her new work—that is the only source of progressive reform in American politics. Meanwhile, the focus of Gerald Davis et al.'s new book is squarely in the organization-centered tradition of social movement scholarship. And yet, while the books are quite different, Doug McAdam and Piven (with Cloward) were all pioneer scholars of the role of political opportunity on movement emergence and outcomes. These two books are testimony to how far research on social movements has come in the past 35 years.

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.

Dictating Development: How Europe Shaped the Global Periphery. By Jonathan Krieckhaus. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 244p. $27.96.

The purpose of this book is lofty: to understand the causes of economic development of the entire world. To be more specific, the study examines 91 countries outside Europe shaped by the colonial experience of the past 500 years. Krieckhaus looks at political science theories of ideology, bureaucracy, class, and education, as well as at economic theories of property rights and central policies. One of his first conclusions is that the settler counties of North America, the Cone of South America, and Australasia are far wealthier than the others. He goes on to examine the varying effects of different colonial powers, such as Portugal, Spain, France, or Britain, and whether the end of colonialism came in the nineteenth century or more recently.

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. By Paul R. Brass. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 448p. $50.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

Rioting in South Asia is commonly understood as a form of political activity, and the idea that it may not be spontaneous but planned is not a novel one. However, in The Production of Hindu Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, Paul Brass makes the more interesting claim that riot-prone cities are those that are marked by institutionalized systems that create, control, and direct the course of riots. He bases these ideas—developed in his earlier work Theft of an Idol—on four decades of research carried out in the northern Indian town of Aligarh, home to a sizable and historic Muslim community. Brass argues that polarizing issues or incidents by themselves do not lead to riots, but that a toxic mix of interested politicians, an existing discourse of communalism, an ineffective administration, and a specialized network that “produces” riots enhances the likelihood that such incidents will eventuate in riots. In describing this social construction of rioting, Brass highlights interesting features, such as the need for a group to dominate the narrative describing the riot, which establishes it as a defensive rather than offensive measure, thereby creating legitimacy for the violence.

Policing Chinese Politics: A History. By Michael Dutton. Durhan, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 411p. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This engaging book offers prodigious empirical research on China's police from the 1930s to 2002 and a provocative perspective on Chinese politics. A short introduction and conclusion establish a theory that draws on Carl Schmitt to link Mao's question “Who are our enemies and who are our friends?” to the extraordinary police technologies that united the latter and defeated the former. The first four of five substantive chapters deal with policing politics during the Jiangxi Soviet era, the Yan'an era, the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution. The last substantive chapter depicts the reform era's transition from politics to economics. The book sheds light on the origins of and prospects for contemporary Chinese politics, but also provides subtle tools for understanding what was more crudely labeled “totalitarianism.” Michael Dutton demonstrates that studying police technologies can yield important insight into politics in general. In an age when important leaders are again casting politics in Manichean terms, Dutton's tale is surely relevant, but how far his police perspective can be extended will remain controversial.

Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations. By Alexander Cooley. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 191p. $35.00 cloth.

War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe. By Victoria Tin-bor Hui. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

These two ambitious books by Alexander Cooley and Victoria Tin-bor Hui address the consequences of managerial decisions within empires. Cooley's book borrows organizational models from the field of business management to explain the growing pains of empires and the misfortunes of newly independent states, with a particular focus on post-Soviet Central Asia. Hui draws on classical authors to explain how basic structural administrative choices within states affect systemic competition.

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.

The Financing of Politics: Latin American and European Perspectives. Edited by Eduardo Posada-Carbó and Carlos Malamud. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution Press, 2005. 266p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Edited books are never consistent across all chapters, but like this one, they can be fun. The book's organization is straightforward: a brief introduction, three increasingly specific theoretical chapters, and seven country case studies covering Latin Europe (Italy, Spain, and France), Britain, and South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, and Uruguay).

Voting Radical Right in Western Europe. By Terri E. Givens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 188p. $65.00.

Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market. By Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 366p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Among the most distressing features of contemporary politics within many older and nascent democracies is the surge of popular and/or electoral support for radical right political parties (RRPs). Oftentimes referred to as the “new right,” “extreme right,” “neopopulist right,” or other similar labels, these illiberal agents have proliferated especially across Western Europe since the 1980s, precipitating considerable consternation among mainstream political parties and elites wherever they have taken root. Although none are on the threshold of achieving a major electoral breakthrough, RRPs currently exercise influence over public political discourse and/or the policy agenda in most of the major immigrant-receiving countries within the region.

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.

Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. By Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 331p. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

In recent years, there has been a surge in work on what has come to be known as “qualitative methods.” The trend is essentially reactive, developing as a response to the outpouring of work on quantitative and formal methods and the assertions by scholars in those areas that case studies and historical work are impressionistic, unscientific, and noncumulative. To counter such claims, some of the field's most distinguished qualitative scholars (e.g., Stephan Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, 1997; James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 2003; and Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 2006) have spent much time and ink to show that researchers who eschew regressions or game theory can be just as methodologically aware and sophisticated as those who embrace them. Alexander George and Andrew Bennett's Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences is an impressive and welcome addition to this literature.

Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies. By Kurt Schock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. $67.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.

Citizen Power, Politics, and the Asian Miracle: Reassessing the Dynamics. By O. Fiona Yap. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 2005. $49.95.

These works exemplify the kind of broadly comparative study that many political scientists call for, yet few actually undertake. Kurt Schock studies six different popular movements against authoritarian rule, and O. Fiona Yap analyzes the interaction between citizens and government in four Asian newly industrialized countries (NICs). Together, they illuminate the dynamics of state-society relations in illiberal political contexts.

Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? By James L. Gibson. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. 448p. $47.50 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In this engaging and meticulously constructed statistical analysis of attitudes among South Africa's apartheid-defined racial groups (African/black, Coloured, Asian, white), James Gibson sets out to do two things. One is to map the state of political reconciliation among these groups. The second is to measure the impact of South Africa's truth and reconciliation process, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in promoting reconciliation. The analysis is based largely on a national opinion survey carried out in 2000 and 2001, but also draws comparatively, where possible and appropriate, on a similar survey from 1997.

Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State. Edited by Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 288p. $29.95.

Is globalization a causal factor in the development of welfare states? If globalization does matter, does it constrain or facilitate the creation and expansion of social programs? If globalization has a positive effect on welfare states, which conditions prevent or enable increases in social spending and broadening of coverage? These questions are the focus of Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer's edited volume. These editors, who coauthored the introduction and conclusion, carefully selected studies by a group of scholars who are all both experts in the study of welfare states and masters of a specific geographic region or country. The studies include Western Europe (by John D. Stephens), Eastern Europe (Mitchell A. Orenstein and Martine R. Haas), Southern Europe (Miguel Glatzer), Latin America (Evelyne Huber), Russia (Linda J. Cook), and South Korea (Ho Keun Song and Kyung Zoon Hong). In addition to these regional or country case studies, there is a variable-oriented chapter by Geoffrey Garrett and David Nickerson that explores correlations between globalization and social spending across a large number of countries. Since they provided the authors with a limited common framework, giving them sufficient room to explore their own ideas, the editors achieved a good balance between coherence and diversity. All the chapters are of high quality, and each provides a particular insight into the relationship between globalization and welfare state development.

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.

Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen. By Jillian Schwedler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 252p. $80.00.

Many attribute the failure of democratization in the Islamic world to the existence of antidemocratic Islamist movements. Why should democratization move forward when the main beneficiaries would allow for “one person, one vote, one time”? Jillian Schwedler in Faith in Moderation refutes this common argument head-on. Schwedler, however, is not merely content in presenting two Islamist parties as “moderate” to show how Islam is not monolithic. She has a more analytical project in which she urges us to unpack many of our assumptions about regime transitions in the Middle East and in general. Her argument targets the linkage between the inclusion of Islamist opposition groups in politics and the effects of their participation in moderating their ideology and behavior. Her treatment of this topic, based in social movement theory, deserves our attention.

Neoliberal Economics, Democratic Transition, and Mapuche Demands for Rights in Chile. By Diane Haughney. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 310p. $59.95.

This book examines an aspect of Chilean politics and history that most specialists tend to ignore. Relying largely on two case studies—hydroelectric and forestry projects in land occupied by the Mapuche people—Diane Haughney sets out to investigate whether the current democratic regime has kept its promise to recognize their demands and aspirations. Her findings are, unsurprisingly, negative. The leaders of Concertación—the center-left coalition that has ruled the country since 1990—have sacrificed the interests of the Mapuche people because of their commitment to neoliberalism.

Rotten States? Corruption, Post-Communism, and Neoliberalism. By Leslie Holmes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 440p. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.

As a veteran of corruption studies in the postcommunist world, Leslie Holmes addresses three fundamental issues confronting students of corruption: the definition and categorization of corruption, the impact corruption has on democracies, and causal factors that account for its rise within postcommunist states. The comparative study focuses on Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. China, the author argues, has developed a system akin to postcommunism and is treated in the analysis as far as data permit. The author also refers to other postcommunist cases, when appropriate, and many of the observations and inferences would apply to all democratic countries.

Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective. By Peter H. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 380p. $74.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Peter Smith set out to write a textbook and ended up compiling an original database of Latin American democracy from 1900 to 2000. Analyzing a century of democratic change, Smith has written an impressive book that is accessible to undergraduates, a great literature review for graduate students, instructive for policymakers, and a significant contribution to scholarly understanding of a complex phenomenon. All of this is done with a lively and jargon-free writing style.

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.