Abstract
London: Sage, 2002. 243, £19.99, ISBN 0 7619 6629 3
London: Sage, 2002. 435, £69.00, ISBN 0 7619 2374 8
Reviewer: MICHAEL CONNOLLY (University of Glamorgan)
Public policy has gone through some interesting times. The subject was ‘discovered’ in the late 1960s, when it appeared on the syllabus of many public administration degrees. At that stage, most of the curriculum consisted of a review of some theories – usually starting off with rationalism and moving to alternative theories such as incrementalism and garbage-can – a discussion of policy formulation, then implementation and finally evaluation, with a few case studies thrown in. A key year was 1984, when the two standard British textbooks appeared: Brian Hogwood and Lewis Gunn's Policy Analysis for the Real World; and, from a different perspective, Christopher Ham and Michael Hill's The Policy Process in the Modern Capitalist State, which later came out in three editions, with Hill becoming the sole author of the third. While there have been lots of books dealing with public policy on topics such as policy networks and governing, we had to wait until 1995 for the next major text, Wayne Parson's Public Policy, dealing with the subject as a whole, followed by Peter John's Analysing Public Policy. In some senses, while everyone recognized the continued importance of the subject, the debate and the language had moved on.
These two books are therefore to be welcomed by those of us retaining an interest in public policy. In certain ways, Hill and Hupe approach their topic with a sense that the caravan has been moving on and a determination to hitch policy implementation to the changing debates. The first half of the book is a review of the top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy implementation, as well as examining those theorists who sought to synthesize both approaches. The latter part of the book deals in essence with two topics, researching into implementation and relating implementation to notions of governance.
Nagel's book consists of a series of chapters, many written by Nagel but also by other scholars, including Robert Golembiewski and Robert Haveman. The first section covers ‘Foundation’ ideas, many of which deal with formulating what Nagel refers to as win-win situations. Section two examines ‘Policy Evaluation at the Cutting Edge’, itself broken into parts. Thus part one examines basic concepts, part three policy evaluation trends, and so on. The final section deals with bibliographies and contains parts that discuss funding and special resources.
I liked the Hill and Hupe volume. It is well written, and even though Michael Hill was a protagonist in some of the early debates, the book represents a very fair examination of the literature. Further, the literature is international, at least in the sense that it draws on British, mainstream European and American, with mention of New Zealand and Australia. I am not sure that the book will put implementation back up the academic agenda, and I would have liked links between implementation and learning theories. Nonetheless, I suspect courses on public policy and related areas, as well as academics conducting research into public policy, will welcome this book, and rightly so.
Any book on evaluation in which Stuart Nagel plays a significant part has to be taken seriously, given that he is one of the doyens in the field – as are some of the other authors. Many of the chapters are succinct and valuable summaries of the literature. The bibliographies are useful and the examination of some techniques will assist in teaching. However, I confess to being disappointed with what claims to be a handbook. A great deal of the book deals with what Nagel refers to as Superoptimum solutions (SOS). While there are references to developing and Eastern European countries, the book is very focused on America and getting on in an American context. European, including British, contributions to evaluation do not get any serious examination. In short, a book worth securing for the library, but not to buy for oneself.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 295, £45.00, ISBN 0 521 81881 8
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research, professional
Rating: *****
Reviewer: JUDE BROWNE (University of Cambridge)
Globalizing processes threaten to undermine the fundamental principles of social justice that have underpinned welfare states since the early twentieth century. Not least because of states' decreasing control on flows of capital, traditional efforts to guarantee ‘decent work and security, equality of opportunity, adequate food and housing and healthcare’ have begun to founder. In recent years, legal, political and social theorists together with activists and broad social movements have attempted to respond to this challenge by shaping new accounts of social and labour rights, seeking to con-stitutionalize the claims and entitlements of all citizens in order to place them beyond the contingencies of practical politics.
This outstanding collection of essays assesses these recent attempts from a wide and often conflicting range of perspectives. The book includes historical and critical surveys examining in particular the successes and failures of the ILO and the EU. This is done from a comparative perspective assessing developments in Europe, Japan and the USA. These discussions illustrate both the difficulty of effectively constitutionalizing social and labour rights in general and the particular challenges posed by contrasting national legal traditions. What sets the book apart from similar works is not only the striking lucidity of most of the essays, but also its continual intellectual focus on the question of enforcement. Whereas most texts in this field tend to concentrate either on the theoretical justifications behind declarations of rights or on the technicalities of the legal frameworks within which they are adopted, the essays in Hepple's volume focus on their effectiveness; the contributions are interested most of all in the possibility that such declarations of rights might actually influence and shape social policy. In so doing, the contributors open up new avenues of enquiry not only for legal scholars, but for those interested in social and labour history, normative political theory and comparative policy formulation. This is, in itself, an extremely important achievement. It is also an instantiation of the book's central claim that the establishment of rights is not the avoidance of politics, but rather the conduct of political conflict by other means.
New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 2001. 895, ISBN 0 07 120202 1
Reviewer: BRIAN GIRVIN (University of Glasgow)
This is a fairly comprehensive and well-organized textbook. While it is impossible to satisfy everyone, this book does cover most of what one would expect to find in a good introduction to comparative politics. The first section (written by Sodaro) is concerned with ‘concepts and critical thinking’ and discusses the nature of power, the nation state and the importance of democracy in a comparative framework. There are also discussions on political culture, party competition and political ideologies. The chapter on ideology discusses liberalism, fascism and socialism but not feminism, which I found disappointing. The changing nature of women's involvement in politics is one of the most profound features of contemporary politics and would have provided an interesting focus for comparison (there is a general discussion on gender in chapter two, but this is not returned to in detail).
The book contains a useful discussion of analytical, qualitative and quantitative political theories, and this is applied as a ‘hypothesis-testing exercise’ in a number of chapters. This exercise is imaginative and draws attention to key issues to be tested in comparative politics. One other peculiarity of this section is the inclusion of a discussion on development by comparing India and South Korea. It seemed to me that this would be better placed in section two with the country studies.
The country studies are well selected and include the UK and Northern Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, Israel, Russia, China, Mexico and Brazil, and Nigeria and South Africa. The authors are to be commended on this, as the reader is introduced to a representative sample of major states in global politics. In each case, there is a brief historical survey and this is followed by an evaluation of the contemporary political process. As is usual in such surveys, smaller states are excluded for the perspective, though some of these could provide a useful balance to the concentration on big states. However, this is a minor quibble. Overall this book provides a useful text for an introductory course on comparative politics, one that could establish a foundation for further study of global or regional politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 319, £14.90, ISBN 0 521 01185-X
Reviewer: ERIC KAUFMANN (Southampton University)
Andreas Wimmer has written an ambitious book that takes issue with those ‘modernists’ who claim that nationalism is in decline (or in transition from an ‘ethnic’ to ‘civic’ mode) as well as those who view the post-1989 upsurge in ethnic conflict and xenophobic politics as evidence of a return to a ‘perennial’ ethno-nationalist condition. Instead, he contends, the ethnically bounded nation is a cardinal principle of modernity – the integrating/excluding mechanism that is an escape-proof fact of our modern world.
Drawing upon his anthropological fieldwork and historical research on Mexico, Iraq and Switzerland, Wimmer presents a subtle, theoretically rich application of his main theses on (a) twin-track ethnic closure and (b) cultural compromise. The latter notion refers to a pool of shared national meanings and goals by diverse class and status actors. The former idea contends that ethnic closure is intrinsic to a modernity that takes the shape of our nation-state system. Where civil society is weakly developed prior to the emergence of the modern state, or where the state lacks the resources to distribute public goods effectively across all ethnic constituencies (such as Iraq or Mexico), ethnicity is politicized at the sub-state level. Conversely, where civil society had deep roots prior to the rise of the state, and economic abundance ensures an easing of the conflict for resources, even a multi-ethnic society (such as Switzerland) can constitute a successful nation state. Though Wimmer's analysis might have been enriched by more consideration of the literature on ‘post-ethnic’ value change in the West, the book deserves to be read by staff and students alike.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 304, £16.95, ISBN 0 521 01053 5
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: ****
Reviewer: WAYNE CLARK (Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College)
This study of political participation examines the extent and nature of citizen involvement in the political process from an international perspective. The book begins with an overview of analytical and conceptual approaches to explaining patterns of political participation. This section of the book includes references to the classic theories of participation and identifies the main factors that have traditionally been advanced as explanations of political mobilization. The book then presents an in-depth overview of international patterns of electoral turnout. This is followed by an analysis of cross-national differences in political party membership. Following a discussion of Putnam's theory of social capital and its relationship to civic society organizations, the book compares participation in traditional vehicles of citizen involvement such as unions and churches with ‘new’ forms of mobilization such as social movements and protest groups. This discussion is rounded off by a consideration of the role of the internet in facilitating transnational activism and political organization.
The comparative analysis of political participation contained throughout the book is extremely detailed and draws together statistical data from a suitably wide range of sources across almost 200 nation states. This book also provides a valuable contribution to the participation literature by placing analysis of activism within a global context. Norris is subsequently able to draw upon empirical data in order to challenge the prevailing wisdom over escalating levels of political apathy within liberal democracies. The book perhaps lacks a qualitative consideration of the varied experiences of political involvement, but this is nonetheless an extremely valuable resource for students of participation and democracy.
Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 351, £23.50, ISBN 0 8229 5785 X
Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 250, $19.95, ISBN 0 7425 2334 9
Readership: Academic/research, professional
Rating: ****
Reviewer: THOMAS D. ZWEIFEL (Columbia University)
At a time when public trust in leadership is at a low ebb – think Enron and Vivendi, Schröder and numerous scandal-ridden municipal governments – two timely books explore how leadership works in action.
Leadership at the Apex is an ambitious fourteen-country study that compares local government leaders across national cultures and emphasizes the interdependence of mayors and their top administrators. Mouritzen and Svara use the term ‘apex’: they see top administrators (whom they call ‘appointed CEOs’) working at the intersection of political and administrative processes. Their international team of researchers surveyed more than 4,300 top administrators in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. They distilled four distinctions of local government: strong-mayor, committee-leader, collective, and council-manager.
The authors aim to explore the relative influence of leaders, institutions and national cultures in local government performance. As carefully argued and fascinating as their book is, Mouritzen and Svara fall short of their objective in one key respect: their dependent variable should be the performance of government, but their study lacks hard indicators for performance. Instead of their sets of dependent variables (roles of leaders, their decision-making, their networking activities, their organizational change behaviour, and their job motivation), it would have been useful to see concrete measures of government effectiveness. Leaders should be judged by their results.
The other book, Leaders, provides six stories of tangible accomplishments by leaders in public affairs. W. Henry Lambright describes how Dr Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project to meet a virtually impossible timeline for tracing the human genome. Norma M. Ricucci shows how Dr Helene Gayle led the fight against HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Beryl A. Radin analyses the leadership of Donna Shalala at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration. Robert B. Denhardt and Janet Vinzant Denhardt show how three local government leaders redefined their mandates. Paul A. Teske and Mark Schneider describe how principals are changing the New York City school system. And Mark W. Huddleston interviewed senior civil servants in the US federal government.
The authors find that none of these leaders used the traditional hierarchical command-and-control model prevalent in the twentieth century. Instead, they dealt with increasing complexity by leading in a new way: by forging consensus and by working across organizational, sectoral and national boundaries. The authors call this style ‘cross-boundary leadership’.
A fascinating account describes how Dr Francis Collins took over the Human Genome Project from his predecessor, James Watson, the famous Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA – a charismatic big leader of the old style, original and volatile. Collins, by contrast, is a low-key leader who checks his ego at the door and finds common ground with superiors, peers and subordinates. Since Craig Ventor of Celera, a private firm, threatened to get to the finish line first, Collins needed to mobilize a government bureaucracy for a breakthrough, much in the tradition of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, or the Apollo project to send a man to the moon and return him to Earth safely.
This is where a key objection to Abramson and Bacon's book arises. They assert that twenty-first-century leadership is radically different from twentieth-century leadership. But why? Is it because of increasing complexity, or increasing globalization? These trends are a fact; but who says that the skill-set of a J. R. Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project was so different from the one of a Francis Collins? Leaders of government agencies always had to forge consensus and balance the interests of diverse constituencies. So Abramson and Bacon are right to point to the need for cross-boundary leadership; but they are wrong to say that this need is new. Nevertheless, their book is useful for finding best practices of leaders in an era of high complexity and rapid change.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 254, £47.50, ISBN 0 333 99360 8
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: *****
Reviewer: ADRIAN BLAU (Queen Mary, University of London)
This book examines the design and redesign of electoral systems in eight East European countries in the 1990s. The motivations behind institutional design are analysed meticulously. Many politicians were self-interested, but also sought efficiency and democratic legitimacy. Conspiracy and cock-up were commonplace. Boris Yeltsin's attempt to manipulate the Russian system ended up helping his opponents. Hungary's system proved so nightmarishly complex that nobody – voters, politicians, experts – could explain how this electoral goulash worked. Mistakes in Ukraine's electoral law left a quarter of the legislature unfilled in 1994. This book gives much ammunition to those who wonder how well politicians or political scientists can design electoral systems.
Embodying Democracy has many strengths – empirical, theoretical and methodological. It adds a wealth of information and insight to the crucial question of why different electoral systems are designed as they are. It makes a valuable contribution to theoretical debates over rational and non-rational influences on electoral system design. The detailed focus on eight countries avoids the arm's-length approach to individual countries that weakens some comparative electoral studies. Unlike most of the literature, this book makes instructive comparisons not just across countries, but also over time.
As the book is called Embodying Democracy, however, we might expect a little more detail about how well these electoral systems do actually embody democracy. The first chapter could discuss alternative principles of representation, not just the communist idea. The last chapter could explain how well the different electoral systems juggle the sometimes competing democratic values of political equality, local accountability, party representation, the majority principle, and so on. But this normative lapse does not detract from the high-quality empirical analysis. This excellent study should be read by all scholars of electoral systems.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 409, £60.00, ISBN 0 19 925322 6
Readership: Postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: ****
Reviewer: INGRID VAN BIEZEN (University of Birmingham)
This book builds on the continuously developing body of scholarly literature on political parties in modern democracies and focuses on the challenges faced by political parties in present-day Western Europe. The two central aims of this volume are to evaluate the empirical findings of contemporary analyses of parties in Western Europe and to suggest avenues for the further development of that research. For this purpose, the book is divided into four sections, each corresponding to a key dimension of political parties. ‘Parties and Society’ includes contributions that concentrate on the attitudinal and psychological linkages between parties and their publics, their organizational linkage with society and the changing patterns of electoral mobilization and campaigning. The chapters in ‘Parties as Purposive Organizations’ focus primarily on party organization, examining their internal life and the stimuli for adaptation and change. The section ‘Parties and National Government’ concentrates on parties as national actors and is concerned with patterns of coalition formation and the capacity of parties as policy-makers. ‘Parties, the Nation-State and Beyond’ examines the impact of institutional constraints on party strategies and the opportunity structures for the development of Euro-parties.
One strength of this volume is that it is more coherent than many of the recently published competitor volumes on political parties, and its theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses are more encompassing and carried out more systematically. It is furthermore marked by the consistently high quality of the contributions. Most authors offer a concise state-of-the-art review of their topic and outline the major theoretical and methodological controversies. While the scholar of contemporary parties can be expected to be familiar with most of these debates, the authors take them as effective points of departure for further theoretical elaborations and sophisticated empirical analyses. All the contributions are furthermore comparative in scope and method, which gives greater strength to the conclusions and greatly improves the potential for the further development of hypotheses and conjectures. However, while one should be sceptical about attempts to develop one overarching ‘party theory’, the volume could probably have benefited from a greater attempt to synthesize the empirical findings and theoretical approaches. Nevertheless, this is a worthy book, both for the wealth of empirical material and as a contribution to further theorizing on the various dimensions of political parties.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 253, £45.00, ISBN 0 333 99846 4
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates
Rating: **
Reviewer: TAKAYUKI SAKAMOTO (Southern Methodist University, USA)
This book is a comparative study of industrialized capitalist economies. Mascarenhas takes a comparative-institutional-historical approach to examining the workings of divergent capitalist economies and provides case studies of the ‘adversarial Anglo-American liberal market’ of the USA, Germany's ‘cooperative social market’ and Japan's ‘state-guided developmental state’ models. His state-centric view attaches central importance to the role of government and its relations with business in determining the nature of economies. Mascarenhas reviews the intellectual history of philosophical foundations of the analysis of capitalism and traces the historical developments of capitalist economies. He emphasizes that the nature and development of capitalist economies are conditioned by historical, cultural, ideological and contextual factors unique to respective economies. He also explains how factors such as globalization and the emergence of flexible, specialized, small-scale production changed the role of the state in the economy.
This is a concise review of the history of political economy thinking and, as such, the book will benefit upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Mascarenhas also does a decent job of synthesizing various existing explanations to provide a coherent account of the development of capitalist economies. But, as with almost any study, the book has weaknesses. First, it has little in the way of novel ideas, data or explanation, since none of his contentions is new, as far as I can see. Second, he fails to consider many recent studies that are empirically and theoretically important. He should have considered those studies and explained what contribution his own study makes to the existing literature. Third, his book is extremely abstract – there is almost no attempt to show how his abstract explanations are relevant to explaining or understanding the real world, and he does not provide materials for the reader to assess the empirical validity of his contentions.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 307, £15.99, ISBN 0 631 22556 0
Readership: Undergraduates
Rating: ***
Reviewer: KHAIRUZZAMAN MOZUMDER (University of Essex)
Improving upon his earlier work, Haynes provides updated analyses of recent political, economic and social developments in developing countries. Such study has been dominated by two paradigms – the modernizationist and dependency. While modernization theorists and their revisionist critics focused principally on domestic factors, old- and neo-dependency theorists sought to explain such outcomes referring primarily to external ones. Haynes attempts to remove lacunae in the field by developing his own model of structured contingency that emphasizes interplay of domestic and international factors.
His theory contends that ‘historically established structures of power’ – for example, formal and informal rules and institutions – form the context within which political leaders act, and ‘human agency’ (such as individual political leaders), sometimes assisted by one-off events, helps overcome any unhelpful rigidity of these structures. The book seeks to demonstrate how the process of democratization and democratic consolidation in developing countries are linked to various interacting domestic and external structural and contingent forces.
Haynes's is a very useful text, providing its undergraduate readership with analytical understanding and conceptual knowledge about a variety of issues pertinent to developing nations, including globalization, economic growth and development, democratization and democracy, ethnic and religious conflicts, human rights, gender and environmental concerns. Another strength rests in its region-wise (for instance, Middle East, South Asia) illustration of each issue with brief case studies and empirical data where necessary.
The book's focus on institutional structures shaping the context resonates new institutionalist thinking. One apparent weakness in Haynes's theory is that, while claiming to reflect interplay, it actually concludes by highlighting the primacy of domestic over external factors. Moreover, the discussion on democratic consolidation could incorporate brief analysis of factors such as agreements or pacts, clear rules defining future elections and existence of contingent consents, and so on. Conclusions such as that democratic polities provide more conducive arenas for pursuing environmental issues and promoting women's empowerment, and allow greater political and civil liberties, required further elaboration.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 378, £45.00, ISBN 0 19 829669 X
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: ***
Reviewer: ROBIN T. PETTITT (University of Manchester)
This edited book is a collection of papers with the common aim of ‘re-examining some of the established concepts, models, and linkages that have underpinned’ the field of party politics for the past five decades (p. 19).
In the first section of the book, the first two chapters, by Daalder and Puhle respectively, examine the literature on the alleged ‘crisis of party’, while the third chapter, by Bartolini, critically examines the literature that uses economic competition as a model for party competition. In the second section of the book, Katz and Mair examine the increasing dominance of the section of the party in public office over other sections of the party, and Wolinetz surveys the ‘catch-all party’ literature. This section also includes two case studies, one on the French Socialist party by Sferza and one on the Spanish CDU by Gunther and Hopkins. Part three examines developments in popular attitudes towards parties and the extent to which parties are to blame for their own negative image. Blondel looks at the effects of semi-legal practices and corruption in Western Europe, and Torcal, Gunther and Montero examine the impact of an increasingly demanding public. Linz picks up on these issues in the final chapter.
While a book with such an impressive array of scholars can hardly avoid being a strong contribution to the field, the individual chapters address very different issues using very different approaches. This in no way belittles the individual contributions, but it means that the book does not quite succeed in becoming more than a collection of individual papers akin to a single issue of a journal. Having said that, it must be reiterated that the individual papers are well worth reading in their own right and most contain innovative research and interesting approaches to the study of political parties.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 234, £14.99, ISBN 0 312 29628 2
Readership: Undergraduates, advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: *****
Reviewer: MIKKO KUISMA (University of Birmingham)
Contemporary welfare states face a number of significant challenges in the twenty-first century. It has been widely asserted that globalization, European integration and demographic changes, for example, cause a serious threat to welfare capitalism. Adopting an evolutionary approach, the contributors to this volume argue that past practices and policies have a significant effect on the options available to societies. Both history and institutions matter when making judgements about the futures of welfare states. Thus, simple patterns of convergence or co-convergence are difficult to detect.
Rothstein, Steinmo and colleagues argue that the reports brought to us about the death of the welfare state were premature, not because they overestimated the nature and power of global changes, but because they underestimated the importance of the specific institutions of modern welfare states. Human choices are bound and influenced by history; and in order to understand and explain those choices, it is essential to understand history. The authors also highlight the role of human agency and are thus able to avoid the potential ‘lock-in’ effects of path dependency. As such, historical institutionalism can indeed provide tools for analysing and explaining political change.
The chapters of the book examine important challenges to contemporary welfare states, ranging from the role of race in welfare, issues of public trust and opinion, privatization and devolution, and questions of immigration. The most interesting contribution is the chapter by Estevez-Abe. She builds a comprehensive and captivating analysis of the Japanese welfare state, which has featured rarely in the rather Euro-centric comparative welfare state literature.
The book is an interesting and coherent collection of highly sophisticated essays and it will certainly have a long-lasting impact on the academic literature on contemporary welfare states. Furthermore, its theoretical insights will undoubtedly prove to strengthen historical institutionalism as an approach to political analysis.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 303, £37.99, ISBN 0 19 512592 4
Readership: Postgraduates, academic/research
Rating: **
Reviewer: JOHN DOYLE (Dublin City University)
This book is a study of the role of nongovernmental organizations in the peace processes of South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. It includes a brief discussion of the theoretical issues involved, four country studies (Israel and Palestine are treated separately) written by local researchers, and an empirical comparison of the role, organization and impact of NGOs in the three regions. The research is based on interviews with activists in a selected number of NGOs. The implied assumption is that NGOs play a conciliatory role in seeking contact and compromise in conflict situations. The organizations selected in each region have, however, very different characteristics, and the significance of this is not adequately discussed. All of the Palestine organizations saw themselves as part of the national liberation struggle. Likewise the South African NGOs saw themselves, and were seen by the African National Congress, as part of the struggle against apartheid. In Israel, most peace groups focused on government policy, rather than on Zionism, but within that context were strong critics of their own government. In contrast, many of the selected NGOs in Northern Ireland were primarily focused on community work, only one was a human rights lobby, two focused on campaigning against paramilitaries – primarily the IRA – and there was little focus on structural factors or government policy.
The conclusion that the NGOs had most impact in South Africa and Israel, and very little in Ireland and Palestine, is not surprising or probably contested, but the analysis of their different impacts is weakly related to the roles that the specific NGOs studied played in each region. Moreover, the book's claim that the weak influence was due to the influence of paramilitaries in Ireland and their use of violence to suppress dissent is not supported by the evidence in the book or elsewhere.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 227, £45.00, ISBN 0 333 92287 5
Readership: Academic/research
Rating: ***
Reviewer: TERESA SACCHET (University of Essex)
It is generally thought that women who join revivalist faith traditions are pressured or manipulated into their decision, as these communities are considered to reinforce patriarchal power relations that oppress women, subdue their autonomy and restrict their roles in society. Consequently, it is difficult to explain why some women in Western society freely choose to become members of these traditions. Focusing on analysis of fieldwork material from Islamic and Protestant communities in Britain and the United States, Myfanwy Franks puts to the test some stereotypes about these women – for example, that they are submissive, oppressed and anti-feminist.
Franks argues that, for many women, the decision to join revivalist traditions is driven not by passive compliance with male demands, but rather by rational choice: it means a path to their physical, spiritual and emotional empowerment. She also asserts that these women stand a kind of resistance to Western exploitation of women through consumerism and overexposure of the female body. Finally, she claims that, at a time in which post-modern relativism has stimulated a trend against the possibility of defining women as a political category, women in revivalist movements might have something to offer feminism. The fact that their identity is closely defined by their biological nature may help restore a notion of womanhood that accounts for women's real-life experience and which is essential for feminist politics. Franks argues that, since gender equality has still not been achieved, a disembodied feminist analysis is disempowering for women as it overlooks the main structures of women's oppression and exploitation.
This book is extremely pertinent at a time when the values of non-Western communities are being put under scrutiny and sometimes depicted as fanaticism. However, Franks is not always successful in reaching the aim she set out to achieve of challenging the stereotypes with research data. Her arguments are well posed, but she sometimes fails to provide evidence for the claims she makes.
London: Routledge, 2001. 394, £60.00, ISBN 0 8153 3438 9
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates
Rating: *****
Reviewer: MONICA THRELFALL (Loughborough University)
This is a far more interesting book than its title makes it sound, for it is about comparing feminist impacts on governance, using job training as a case. It is a tightly structured nine-country comparative study of how policy triangles (formed by collective actors such as the women's movement, policy agents or mediators such as feminist politicians, and public administrations) interact when they have to deal with major policy areas such as job training for women. The aim is to identify whether women's policy agencies bring women's movement issues and actors into the policy-making processes of the state when it comes to job training. Do women's policy offices matter? And if so, why? These are key questions asked for Spain, Austria, Italy, France, Finland, Ireland, Canada and the USA, as well as the EU.
This is the second book from the international Research Network on Gender, Politics and the State, which produced the innovative Comparative State Feminism (Sage, 1995) edited by Amy Mazur and D. M. Stetson. Here Mazur's rich comparative analysis reveals a more nuanced picture of women's movement influence on policy-making, because it shows that ‘the presence of an active women's movement and a left-wing government may not be the only ingredients for women's success or failure’. The particular dynamics of job training mean that women's policy offices have only an indirect impact: gender is at the periphery of the politics of job training. This is an important finding. The study documents how ‘established employment players’, mainly employers and trade unions, exclude gender issues and the actors who advance them. This dynamic highlights the difficulties encountered by gender mainstreaming approaches advocated by feminists. Particularly commendable is the book's methodology, an excellent advance on ways of tackling the perennial problem of measuring the influence and impact of policy actors.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 269, £45.00, ISBN 0 333 96859 X
Reviewer: KAREN MINGST (University of Kentucky)
Philip Everts addresses a critical theoretical and practical question: the relationship between democracy and foreign policy, and whether public opinion in Western democracies is willing to support and sustain uses of military force necessary for international order and respect for human rights. Using a variety of secondary public opinion polls, the author examines interrelated questions in four case studies: defence conversion; the 1990–91 Gulf war; the Yugoslavia crisis; and the Kosovo multilateral intervention. The author finds that public support for the military is generally stable. Willingness to use force depends on the nature of the interests, the effectiveness of force, and fear of casualties. Of these explanations, the casualty hypothesis is examined in detail. Contrary to the current wisdom, Everts suggests that casualties are not the decisive factor in shaping public support. Although democracy and foreign policy may be somewhat incompatible, there is evidence of a stable, structured and rational public opinion.
Everts is addressing age-old questions. The most thorough contribution to the literature is the overview of public opinion in democracies, and the unique contribution is the extended discussion of the casualty hypothesis. The cases selected are timely and relevant, and the public opinion data is extensive, from European and American sources. Because the author utilizes polls already reported, the analysis rests on an assortment of questions, not always precisely on the issue. While polls are included from many countries, those from the Netherlands are the most comprehensive. The variety of questions analyzed should make the reader cautious of drawing too many generalizations, although public opinion researchers will find the compilation of polls useful. The book represents a solid contribution to a timely topic.
Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2002. 462, $26.95, ISBN 0 7391 0318 0
Readership: Advanced undergraduates
Rating: ***
Reviewer: STEPHEN WELCH (University of Durham)
First, some remarks on the title of this book. Readers should not expect to find content along the lines of Pye and Verba's classic Political Culture and Political Development, or more recent work in the same genre by Diamond. Indeed, the concepts of political culture and globalization occur at all, and then not centrally, in only two or three of the nineteen items anthologized here. ‘Comparative’ is also a little misleading, so far as it suggests the comparison of cases within a generic framework – there is nothing of the kind in this book. Furthermore, the term ‘introductory’ seems a little misplaced, as several of the selections make few concessions to readability.
The volume takes its place within a series, ‘Studies in Comparative Political Theory’, whose aim is to broaden political theory and debate beyond their customary Euro-American boundaries. Few other common themes can be identified. Some entries are concerned with, or derive from, post-modern literary theory (on the role of power in translation, for example); some seek to display non-Western resources for political theory (for instance, from Confucianism); several are deconstructive and critical in intent (targeting the usual suspects of rationalism and essentialism). In short, multiculturalism is both discussed and exhibited.
The usefulness of the selections is variable. Several tempt the reader to look up the original sources (which date from 1988 to 2000), while others suggest to me a strict policy of avoidance. Some mistake neologism for originality, others are genuinely thought-provoking and informative. The principles of selection seem somewhat obscure, though perhaps it is ‘logocentric’ to seek them. This raises the question: what is the point of such an anthology? The book is not, as noted, an introductory reader. But it does advertise some interesting arguments, which is a useful function. It is also quite timely in the context of recent assertions (academic, political and military) of universalist ethics.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. 318, £18.99, ISBN 0 7190 5978 X
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, academic/research, professional
Rating: ****
Reviewer: JOHANNA KANTOLA (University of Bristol)
This timely collection of articles on gender and mainstreaming has been published for and on behalf of the United Nations. The book offers both detailed theoretical discussions on the topic and country-specific case studies.
Its theoretical contributions include analyses on the slippery concept of gender mainstreaming and its history in the UN. Usefully, the book also offers some practical guidelines on how to go about doing gender mainstreaming. Other theoretical chapters in the first part of the book discuss successes and failures of mainstreaming projects and provide some comparative analyses on the topic (Shirin Rai, Kathleen Staudt, Anne Marie Goetz, and Nüket Kardam and Selma Acuner). A common theme running through the chapters is a focus on institutions and institutional mechanisms and their role in successful mainstreaming policies. Here the specific interest is on national machineries as catalysts in advancing women's interests and the variety of solutions in different countries. The chapters illustrate that an analysis of gender mainstreaming is fundamental to any debates on good governance and democratization.
The collection's focus on women in development and gender and development literatures makes it interesting and refreshing. The book moves beyond the traditional European and Australian examples on gender mainstreaming and thus reaches out for a wider audience. It does include interesting chapters on Sweden, Australia and the UK, but also on Ecuador, Philippines, Uganda, India and Eastern Europe. The chapters analyse the role of international institutions in pressuring national governments to establish national machineries to advance the interests of women, but they also highlight the crucial role that women's movements played in these countries.
London: Earthscan, 2002. 208, £15.95, ISBN 1 85383 752 0
London: Frank Cass, 2002. 168, £17.50, ISBN 0 7146 8240 3
Reviewer: GAYIL TALSHIR (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
It took almost two decades for the new social movements (NSMs) to gain enough legitimacy as collective actors to be worthy of political analysis. When at last reaching centre-stage, in the 1980s, they arrived as the bearers of ‘New Politics’. New Politics carried a promise to the discipline – political scientists developed a new research paradigm interconnecting the personal (change in value-preferences), social (materialism/post-materialism cleavage) and political (alternative and Green parties) levels. Green parties were the protagonists of alternative politics, established as the parliamentary arm of the social movements. In contradistinction to their role as a new kind of political actor, Green parties were, from the perspective of the party system, single-issue environmental organizations with a meagre chance of passing the electoral threshold, even as potential coalition partners. The two books under review address the dissonance between their self-perception as New Politics bearers and their role as minor players in the party system.
Green parties were typically analyzed either through collections of cross-national case studies or as in-depth studies of one or two cases. In that respect, both books present an important change: they provide an interrelated comparative analysis of a small number of Green parties, using different criteria for party selection: Burchell selected four parties that ‘have developed under markedly different circumstances and have undergone significant transformations’ (Burchell, p. 4); Müller-Rommel and Poguntke analyzed the five Green parties in national governments. Both draw on Harmel and Janda's theory of party goals and change: winning votes, advocating ideology, implementing party democracy and gaining executive office (Burchell, p. 48). Burchell addresses only the first three goals, Müller-Rommel and Poguntke exclusively the fourth goal, thus interestingly complementing each other.
Burchell's significant contribution to the literature lies in the analytical framework he proposes, which combines internal factors, characteristic of Green Parties (NSMs background, ecological concerns, party democracy), with external ones (political opportunity structure, electoral systems). He offers a fourfold framework to trace Green parties' transformation: emergence in relation to political opportunities structures, strategy towards other parties, organizational structures and party policies (p. 50). Whereas the first and third themes demonstrate the strength of Burchell's analytical framework, the other two encapsulate his major difficulty: he measures party positioning presupposing that the Greens address almost exclusively ecological issues and are, therefore, ‘neither right nor left’. Their incorporation of social issues is analyzed solely as a reaction to the established parties, which is, arguably, simply wrong (for example, 50 percent of Die Grünen's 1980 Basisprogramm addressed ‘the individual and society’, three years before the party entered the Bundestag). Similarly, he analyzes only their ecological policies, treating them as environmental movements, whereas it is clear from his own analysis that the anti-nuclear, peace and feminist movements were as central to their emergence (except in the UK). Nevertheless, he provides a complex and convincing matrix for the comparative framework, which could easily incorporate other policy issues of citizenship, women's equality and minorities' rights.
Müller-Rommel and Poguntke strive to demonstrate that ‘the often quoted “new political dimension” … that Green parties have introduced to European systems, has consolidated itself over the past twenty years’ (p. 7). Improving the traditional framework of individual cases written by national experts, each chapter is structured around four themes: activities during governmental formation, behaviour within governments, impact on government's policy and governmental participation's effects on the party. Their framework categorizes two types of governing Green parties: the strong Green performer, defined by relatively high and stable electoral results and parliamentary strength (Germany, Belgium); and a weak Green performer, with relatively weak electoral results and parliamentary representation (France, Italy, Finland) (p. 8). Whereas some of the chapters are more formal, others, in particular Rüdig's excellent piece on the German Greens, provide an informed and insightful view on the party's understanding of organizational, policy and programme changes.
Poguntke's concluding chapter raises a fundamental issue. Green parties took longer than other small parties to involve in power politics, since ‘many green activists did not think that national governments were the real loci of power’ (p. 133). Thus, the criteria used to address Green parties – electoral success, policy change, blackmail potential – are extraneous to the agenda of New Politics, which continues to be to expose injustices, change the public agenda and generate a participatory democracy. In the foreword, Inglehart writes: ‘The “Silent Revolution” of individual-level value change may have fundamentally transformed the belief system of Western mass publics, but it has not radically reshaped the established political institutions of Western democracies’. Political scientists should therefore reject the temptation of applying conventional methodologies of party analysis and combine them with a more complex framework, as these two books successfully did.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 374, £50.00, ISBN 0 7546 0909 X
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates
Rating: **
Reviewer: GORDON JOHNSTON (Leeds Metropolitan University)
The starting point in this comparative study is a desire to move beyond the general claim that ‘culture matters’ to ‘specify which culture impacts on what outcome’. The authors, while recognizing that ‘culture’ has become a key term in the social sciences, assert that it remains ‘a most vague concept’, either referring to ‘almost all kinds of human endeavours’ or standing ‘specifically for symbols’. To remedy this, the authors define culture as comprising ethnicity, religion, historical legacy and universal values. Using quantitative methods, the authors explore what roles ‘these cultural items play in terms of outcomes in society and politics’. An important sub-plot in the study is whether what is variously referred to as ‘New Cultural Theory’ and ‘the newly emerging cultural approach frameworks’ constitute a challenge to rational choice approaches. The findings of the study are reported by level – macro, regional, micro – and a comparison of the impact of cultural factors in six countries. A few of the highlights include the conclusion that ethnic impact is ‘most visible in plural or divided societies where ethnic cleavages take on a regional dimension’, that British colonial rule had ‘less negative repercussions than the other forms of colonial rule, except the Danish case of Greenland’, and that while many aspects of life are ‘related to, or expressed in, values, it has proven more difficult to give strong evidence for the occurrence of value effects’. There is much in this study that is interesting and provocative, but it also frustrates. First, the concept of culture is considered without reference to the rich discussions that are now commonplace across the humanities and social sciences, testimony perhaps to the limitations of an overly narrow disciplinary approach. Second, while the authors' insistence on evidence is an important corrective to accounts of the world assembled from a bricolage of theory, hypotheses and musing, a discussion of the appropriateness of their chosen methodology would have been useful. The latter seems particularly important given the use that the authors make of proxy data. Finally, it would have been interesting to know what questions the authors thought their study raised for the competing claims of rational choice and cultural approaches.
Cambridge: Polity, 2002. 184, £14.99, ISBN 0 7456 2844 3
Rating: ****
Reviewer: Lee Salter (London Metropolitan University)
This book has, in some respects, turned a good deal of media theory on its head. Meyer does not argue that the distinguishing feature of modern mass media is its being cynically manipulated by government and politicians for their own ends, or being something that acts as a fourth estate, keeping wayward politicians in line. Instead, he embarks on a somewhat convincing quasi-systems-theoretic approach. Accordingly, media logic and political logic are two different things. Media logic structures content according to two main filters, news values and presentation style, which then turn political content into either entertainment or something that corresponds to media aesthetics. Commodification also acts as a filter that restricts treatment of political content to the former.
Political logic depends on a public sphere, which is not served by media logic. Ultimately, the time element is all-important; the political sphere depends on careful consideration of issues over a long period of time, which the media sphere has no ‘soft spot for’ (p. 48). The argument follows that politicians are too willing to adopt media logic at the expense of careful and inclusive democratic discourse. There are two possible responses to ‘media democracy’. Either politics continues on this path and becomes another entertainment product, as in the USA or citizens are factored in to the running of the media.
Meyer has presented a clear and well-structured argument. The stages of the argument follow a logical structure, with a summary at the end of each chapter that covers the main points of the preceding argument. While one may disagree with his overall argument – sometimes politicians seem like unwitting victims – this book is certainly a worthy and sober undertaking.
Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 2002. 302, $19.95, ISBN 1 58465 173 3
Readership: Advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, professional
Rating: ***
Reviewer: ROBIN T. PETTITT (University of Manchester)
The idea that informed citizens are better able to participate in the democratic process than uninformed citizens is perhaps an obvious one, but nevertheless one that has received remarkably little attention in the scholarly literature. Milner's book is an attempt to start covering that gap.
The book is divided into four sections. In part one, Milner engages with the social capital literature to which the idea of civic literacy is closely associated and argues that deficiencies in this literature can be covered by the idea of civic literacy. In part two, Milner explores the sources of civic literacy and makes two main conclusions. First, while political parties are important sources of information on the political choices available to voters, they are better able to fulfil this role under proportional representation than in ‘first past the post’ systems. Second, he discovers that societies with a high dependency on television for political information are generally lower in civic literacy than societies where newspapers still hold a major role. In part three, he explores ways in which public policy choices can enhance a population's level of civic literacy. Finally, in part four, he argues that rational individuals making informed choices will prefer to live in societies with a relatively equal distribution of wealth and will vote accordingly. Hence the comprehensive welfare states in the high civic literacy societies of the Nordic countries.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from the incompleteness of its cross-national empirical sources. Milner is forced to spend a distracting amount of space showing how incomplete data sets can nevertheless be used. However, the alleged link between high civic literacy and comprehensive welfare systems is a bold and controversial conclusion. Despite the above-mentioned problems with the data sources, this is an important contribution to the literature on civic engagement – or disengagement, as the case may be. Politicians from local councillors to MPs and MEPs, worried about declining and in some cases collapsing voter turnouts, should find much of interest in Milner's book.
Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003. 121, £9.00, ISBN 1 930365 09 8
Reviewer: LEE SALTER (London Metropolitan University)
This book consists of three papers relating to how the internet may help or hinder ‘democracy’. The first two papers look at how the internet might be used to help the development of democracy in what are considered to be an ‘undemocratic’ region and an immature demo-cratic region: the Middle East and South America respectively. The final paper investigates the possible contributions that the internet might make to ‘The Democracy’, the US Congress.
The book as a whole swings from wild inaccuracies such as ‘[t]he idealistic technologists who developed the Internet were sure it would invigorate democracy and spread democratic values around the globe’ – which is simply untrue – to some reasonably interesting analysis. Its main shortcoming is that the meaning of neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘the internet’ is explained to any sufficient degree. The effect of this seems to be that ‘democracy’ and ‘the US’ are synonyms: democracy is what America does. This leaves the authors with an unanswered analytical problem: what of other forms of democracy? Another problem resulting from this omission is that, in the first paper, ‘democracy’ seems to mean whatever most effectively breaks down cultural specificity, which is compounded by its failure to propose necessary conditions for democracy. Although the second paper better addresses the question of why certain regions have failed to adopt and retain ‘democratic’ systems, neither really considers the subtle specificities that may help explain this. Nor does either mention the most obvious influence: the neoimperialist foreign policy of certain state actors. The problem with there being no definition of the internet is that it is never clear whether the authors are referring to the internet in general or computer networks as such, which is particularly telling in the third paper.
One of the main themes of the book is, however, accurate and helpful. The authors note that the free market is not a sufficient mechanism to ensure the spread of the internet, though a mention of the massive government investment in the development of the internet prior to 1993 in the USA may have helped demystify the spread of the internet in that country.
Comparative
New books received
Michael Banton (2002) The International Politics of Race. Cambridge: Polity, 236, £14.99, ISBN 0 7456 3049 9
Manfred Berg and Martin H. Geyer (eds) (2002) Two Cultures of Rights: the quest for inclusion and participation in modern America and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 293, £35.00, ISBN 0 521 79266 5
Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Jeremy Mitchell (eds) (2002) Authoritarianism and Democracy in Europe, 1919–39: comparative analyses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 366, £55.00, ISBN 0 333 96606 6
Mark Blyth (2002) Great Transformations: economic ideas and institutional change in the twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 296, £15.95
Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (eds) (2003) Spaces of Neoliberalism: urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, 305, £15.99, ISBN 1 40510 105 9
Hana Polackova Brixi and Allen Schick (2002) Government at Risk: contingent liabilities and fiscal risk. Washington DC: World Bank, 483, £37.99, ISBN 0 19 521610 5
Gregg Bucken-Knapp (2003) Elites, Language, and the Politics of Identity: the Norwegian case in comparative perspective. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 205, $18.95, ISBN 0 7914 5656 0
Martin J. Bull and James L. Newell (eds) (2003) Corruption in Contemporary Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 288, £50.00, ISBN 0 333 80298 5
Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner (eds) (2002) Death Squads in Global Perspective: murder with deniability. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 382, £14.99, ISBN 1 4039 6094 1
Paul Carmichael and Arthur Midwinter (eds) (2003) Regulating Local Authorities: emerging patterns of central control. London: Frank Cass, 164, £42.50, ISBN 0 7146 5373 X
Mark Cassell (2002) How Governments Privatize: the politics of divestment in the United States and Germany. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 317, £44.50, ISBN 0 87840 879 7
Margaret Chatterjee (2002) Hinterlands and Horizons: excursions in search of amity. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 156, £16.95, ISBN 0 7391 0398 9
Mario Diani and Doug McAdam (eds) (2003) Social Movements and Networks: relational approaches to collective action. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 368, £55.00, ISBN 0 19 925177 0
Hugo Dobson and Glenn D. Hook (eds) (2003) Japan and Britain in the Contemporary World: responses to common issues. London: Routledge, 256, £65.00, ISBN 0 415 30414 8
Nives Dolšak and Elinor Ostrom (eds) [foreword by Bonnie J. McCay] (2003) The Commons in the New Millennium: challenges and adaptation. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 393, £17.95, ISBN 0 262 54142 4
Kerstin Dressel (2002) BSE - the New Dimension of Uncertainty: the cultural politics of science and decision-making. Berlin: Edition Sigma, 231, £18,90, ISBN 3 89404 496 9
John S. Dryzek, David Downes, Christian Hunold and David Schlosberg with Hans-Kristian Hernes (2003) Green States and Social Movements: environmentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Norway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 237, £50.00, ISBN 0 19 924902 4
John L. Esposito and François Burgat (eds) (2003) Modernizing Islam: religion in the public sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 288, £16.50, ISBN 1 85065 678 9
Peter Fairbrother and Charlotte A. B. Yates (eds) (2003) Trade Unions in Renewal: a comparative study. London: Continuum, 302, £35.00, ISBN 0 8264 5437 2
Daniel M. Green (ed.) (2002) Constructivism and Comparative Politics. Armonk NY: Sharpe, 278, $26.95, ISBN 0 7656 0861 8
Cyrille Guiat (2003) The French and Italian Communist Parties: comrades and culture. London: Frank Cass, 229, £39.50, ISBN 0 7146 5332 2
Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil (eds) (2002) Dual Nationality, Social Rights and Federal Citizenship in the US and Europe: the reinvention of citizenship. New York: Berghahn, 350, £17.00, ISBN 1 57181 805 7
Leah Haus (2002) Unions, Immigration, and Internationalization: new challenges and changing coalitions in the United States and France. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 220, £40.00, ISBN 0 312 29494 8
Neil Hawke (2002) Environmental Policy: implementation and enforcement. Aldershot: Ashgate, 414, £25.00, ISBN 0 7546 2311 4
Dave Huitema (2002) Hazardous Decisions: hazardous waste siting in the UK, The Netherlands and Canada. Institutions and discourses. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 518, £102.00, ISBN 1 4020 0969 0
Helge Hveem and Kristen Nordhaug (eds) (2002) Public Policy in the Age of Globalization: responses to environmental and economic crises. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 265, £47.50, ISBN 0 333 99848 0
Prem Shankar Jha (2002) The Perilous Road to the Market: the political economy of reform in Russia, India and China. London: Pluto, 300, £16.99, ISBN 0 7453 1851 7
Saira Khan (2002) Nuclear Proliferation Dynamics in Protracted Conflict Regions: a comparative study of South Asia and the Middle East. Aldershot: Ashgate, 328, £45.00, ISBN 0 7546 1946 X
Tomáš Kostelecký (2002) Political Parties after Communism: developments in east-central Europe. Washington DC and Baltimore MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 233, £19.00, ISBN 0 8018 6851 3
Todd Landman (2003) Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics: an introduction. Second edition. London: Routledge, 312, £18.99, ISBN 0 415 27270 X
Zig Layton-Henry and Czarina Wilpert (eds) (2003) Challenging Racism in Britain and Germany. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 302, £47.50, ISBN 0 333 64317 8
Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris (eds) (2002) Comparing Democracies 2: new challenges in the study of elections and voting. London: Sage, 279, ISBN 0 7619 7223 4
Martin Lodge (2002) On Different Tracks: designing railway regulation in Britain and Germany. Westport CT: Praeger, 229, £42.00, ISBN 0 275 97601 7
Neil Colman McCabe (ed.) (2002) Comparative Federalism in the Devolution Era. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 364, £72.00, ISBN 0 7391 0276 1
David Maybury-Lewis (ed.) (2003) The Politics of Ethnicity: indigenous peoples in Latin American states. Cambridge MA: Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 408, £16.50, ISBN 0 674 00964 9
Alfred P. Montero (2002) Shifting States in Global Markets: subnational industrial policy in contemporary Brazil and Spain. University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 271, $45.00, ISBN 0 271 02189 6
Layna Mosley (2003) Global Capital and National Governments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 400, £18.95, ISBN 0 521 52162 9
Jeff Pratt (2003) Class, Nation and Identity: the anthropology of political movements. London: Pluto, 228, £15.99, ISBN 0 7453 1671 9
Robert D. Putnam (ed.) (2002) Democracies in Flux: the evolution of social capital in contemporary society. New York: Oxford University Press, 516, £25.99, ISBN 0 19 515089 9
Julian V. Roberts and Mike Hough (eds) (2002) Changing Attitudes to Punishment: public opinion, crime and justice. Cullompton: Willan, 244, £25.00, ISBN 1 84392 002 6
Jonathan A. Rodden, Gunnar S. Eskeland and Jennie Litvack (eds) (2003) Fiscal Decentralization and the Challenge of Hard Budget Constraints. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 486, £33.50, ISBN 0 262 18229 7
Mark J. Roe (2003) Political Determinants of Corporate Governance: political context, corporate impact. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 241, £24.99, ISBN 0 19 924074 4
Terence Roehrig (2002) The Prosecution of Former Military Leaders in Newly Democratic Nations. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 220, £33.25, ISBN 0 7864 1091 4
Jeffrey Ian Ross (2003) The Dynamics of Political Crime. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, 208, £25.00, ISBN 0 8039 7044 7
H. V. Savitch and Paul Kantor (2002) Cities in the International Marketplace: the political economy of urban development in North America and Western Europe. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 469, £24.95, ISBN 0 691 09159 5
Miranda A. Schreurs (2002) Environmental Politics in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 305, £17.95, ISBN 0 521 52537 3
Jefferey M. Sellers (2002) Governing from Below: urban regions and the global economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 420, £19.95, ISBN 0 521 65707 5
Martin Shapiro and Alec Stone Sweet (2002) On Law, Politics and Judicialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 428, £60.00, ISBN 0 19 925647 0
Donley T. Studlar (2002) Tobacco Control: comparative politics in the United States and Canada. Ontario: Broadview, 327, £14.99, ISBN 1 55111 456 9
Duane Swank (2002) Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 349, £15.95, ISBN 0 521 00144 7
Paul Webb, David Farrell and Ian Holliday (eds) (2002) Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 487, £55.00, ISBN 0 19 924055 8
Kurt Weyland (2002) The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 353, £27.95, ISBN 0 691 09643 0
Howard J. Wiarda (2003) Civil Society: the American model and Third World development. Boulder CO: Westview, 182, £18.50, ISBN 0 8133 4077 2
Harold L. Wilensky (2002) Rich Democracies: political economy, public policy, and performance. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 922, £29.95, ISBN 0 520 23279 8
Jonathan Zeitlin and David M. Trubek (eds) (2003) Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American experiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 432, £50.00, ISBN 0 19 925716 7