Charles Lees has produced a succinct yet compelling assessment of the Greens' “long march to power” in Germany through a succession of state governments to the Social Democratic–Green national coalition formed following the 1998 Bundestag election. His account is conceptually sound and (apart from several omissions) highly informative. It provides useful insights into the dynamics of SPD–Green politics that will interest German specialists and comparativists alike.

Market and Community is both more than the sum of its parts and less than what it promises. The book is more than the sum of its parts since it is a more a sequence of independent thoughtful essays than a unitary thesis. It is, however, less than what it promises because the links between the analytic and the empirical chapters are less than perfectly specified.

Daniel Levy and Kathleen Bruhn, leading Mexicanists, use their scholarly expertise to provide a welcome addition to the literature on contemporary Mexican politics. This work is a lucid, well-integrated interpretation of Mexico's recent transformation economically and politically. It benefits from the past research of both authors and from the insights of their Mexican colleague. The book's primary focus, as they argue in the introductory chapter, is the fundamental role of democracy in altering Mexico's developmental path and political discourse.

What does protest means in industrial societies? To answer this question, David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow bring together political scientists and sociologists from Europe and the United States to build on comparative insights. The 17 contributors include some of the most prominent voices in the study of contentious politics as well as a few new ones. Some chapters are organized around case studies (Klandermans, Roefs, and Olivier on the African National Congress; Rucht on protest in Germany; and McCarthy and McPhail on protest in the United States), while others compare across cases (Crozat on Western democracies; Della Porta, Fillieule, and Reiter on policing in France and Italy; Kubik on Central Europe; Hipsher on Latin America). The editors' introduction and the final two chapters (Katzenstein on feminist movements; Keck and Sikkink on transnational advocacy networks) advance cross-regional comparisons.

Given the Right's historic record of undermining democracy in Latin America, Kevin Middlebrook organized a conference in 1996 to examine its adjustment to the democratic rules of the posttransitions, post-Cold War era. This work began in that conference and is part of the editor's larger research program.

This comprehensive volume analyzing Western European government coalitions from 1945 until 1999 is an impressive and meticulously researched work. Using a uniform, cross-national collection of data the authors examine both the governing institutions and the patterns of conflict resolution in the 13 Western European democracies that have experienced coalition government during the post-World War two years.

In February of 1995, following the disastrous December 1994 devaluation of the Mexican peso, which sent incomes down temporarily by as much as 60% and threw more than a million laborers out of work, the nonagenarian labor leader Fidel Velasquez issued a curious statement. He declared that each Mexican worker (earning on average at that time about six dollars a day) should pledge one day's pay toward Mexico's external debt to show solidarity with Mexico's 24 ailing billionaires, some of whom were now merely several-hundred-millionaires. In a country where jokes are often the most telling form of popular political commentary, nobody knew whether to laugh or cry at doddering Velasquez's exhortation. After all, his long record as an advocate of painful wage caps and government downsizing suggested that he actually might be serious.

Compared to neighboring Latvia and Estonia, there has been little attention paid to nationality issues in Lithuania, a country with fewer ethnic minorities (making up approximately 20% of the population) and a more inclusive citizenship policy than her Baltic neighbors. Also, Lithuania's main problems have concerned relations with its Polish minority, whereas Latvia and Estonia have large numbers of “Russian speakers.” This means that Russia has been less critical and has not sought to draw international attention to minority issues in Lithuania. As a result, the international community has praised Lithuania's laws for meeting international standards and has given a “pass” to Lithuania when it comes to the treatment of its ethnic minorities. Vesna Popovski seeks to challenge this positive assessment and is motivated by a concern for the actual implementation of laws, as opposed to the mere letter of the law, and seeks to discover the perceptions that minorities have toward their state and its policies.

The department where I did my graduate training in the early 1970s was bitterly split between advocates of case-study and statistical approaches. At the time, both sides thought the other would fade away—statistical analysis was a fad; case studies, a relic from a prescientific past. But 30 years later, both methods persist, and the debate has recently intensified in response to King, Keohane, and Verba's (1994) assertion in Designing Social Inquiry that the methodology of case studies could be subsumed under that used in statistical research. The polite names for the two positions have changed—“case study” versus “large N” is more common now than the “traditional” versus “scientific” monikers of the 1960s and 1970s; the epithets—“slow journalism” versus “mindless number crunching”—remain much the same.

With his systematic study of the effects of timber windfall booms on the institutions of four Southeast Asian states, Michael Ross informs the often emotional debate about the relative costs and benefits of “openness” to international trade. Ross investigates the effects of such windfall booms in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak on state institutions and finds that their openness to international trade has rendered these states institutionally vulnerable. In so doing, he makes an important extension to the contributions of Peter Gourevitch and Peter Katzenstein, who have focused on the effects that different state institutions have had on national responses to exogenous—usually unpleasant—shocks in European countries (e.g., see Peter A. Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times, 1986, and Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets, 1978). Contrary to expectations, Ross finds that positive shocks (revenue windfalls) have generally corrosive effects not only on the economy (the “Dutch disease” syndrome) but also—and this is the heart of Ross's contribution—on the very institutions of the state. How this institutional corrosion sets in, why it does so, and why the effects prove to be so debilitating are the principal foci of this book.

Filippo Sabetti has written an important book, not just for specialists in Italian politics, but also for those more generally interested in comparative politics. Poor government performance has often been associated with the Italian state, so much so that foreign scholars often used Italy as an ideal locale to probe the seminal causes of political pathology. Edward Banfield's (1958) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, for example, attributed poor political performance to the particular beliefs and attitudes of Italians, to an inadequate moral basis he identified as “amoral familism.” The village Banfield studied, Chiaromonte (which he called Montegrano), soon became a model for “backward societies” in the comparative literature and later was woven into game theoretic concerns, such as the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma. Banfield's “culturalist” approach was later refined in Robert Putnam's (1993) Making Democracy Work. Rather than condemning all Italy to pathological status, as Banfield's Montegrano writ large, Putnam compared the “unsuccessful” South with the civic-minded North, where a density of associations and an abundance of “social capital” not only made “democracy work,” but also contributed to economic prosperity. Putnam later extended this analysis of associability and social capital to the United States, most famously in his work on “bowling alone.”

Eliz Sanasarian's book is a welcome addition to the growing number of books on Iran since the Islamic Republic replaced the monarchy in 1979. She deals with an important yet little-covered subject: how religious minorities fare under an Islamic government. Just as Sanasarian's first book, The Women's Rights Movement in Iran, broke new ground and added much to our knowledge about of the status of women under the monarchy and the first few years of the Islamic Republic, Religious Minorities in Iran also fills a gap in scholarship. Some books and articles have been published since the Islamic revolution on Iranian Jews and Bahais, but little has appeared on Iran's Zoroastrian and Armenian communities, and virtually nothing on Iran's Chaldeans and Assyrians. No one has treated all the religious minorities in one volume. (Sansarian is, of course, dealing with religious minorities, not ethnic communities such as the Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, Turks, and others.)

This nice, tight volume offers a novel approach to looking at the civil–military issues that have been a major focus of political science and Latin American studies over the past four decades. Using 10 short essays by predominantly Europe-based scholars (Frederick Nunn of the United States, Celso Castro of Brazil, and Francisco Rojas Arevana of Chile are the exceptions), this collection stretches the evaluative process of civilian–military interactions in the region. Not merely accepting the bureaucratic–authoritarian model of Guillermo O'Donnell or others, it uses a much broader measure of the relationships in society to evaluate the health of Latin America today. It is a short collection that would be an excellent challenge for new graduate students in the subfield of civil–military relations or Latin American politics.

Students of social movements have long struggled to explain why insurgencies occur where and when they do. In this excellent study, Heather Williams examines two contemporary Mexican movements—one rural, one urban—as a means to explain why unrest develops, when movements form, and what movement activists are likely to do once they manage to construct an organization and articulate a set of collective demands. Expanding on the work of Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and other scholars who have wrestled with these questions, Williams is concerned with the way in which Mexico's successive economic crises, and the implementation of neoliberal policies in response to these crises, influence the manner in which the dispossessed organize and press their demands on the state.

Teresa Wright provides a well-researched in-depth comparative analysis of student movements in China and Taiwan. Although this is not the only work to look at these movements, this book is a useful addition to the literature because it (1) contains information about the political environment in China and Taiwan in the late 1980s, (2) presents thorough accounts of events from the beginning to the end of both movements, (3) provides valuable information about organizational decision making and conflicts within the student protest groups, and (4) puts forth several hypotheses about dissident behavior that can be applied to other cases. China's Democracy Movement of 1989 and Taiwan's Month of March Movement of 1990 are cases that cry out for comparison. Both movements were preceded by conflict regarding a change or shift of power in their governments, and students in both movements exhibited similar behavior. However, the Democracy Movement of 1989 was ended by the state with the use of violent repression, while the Month of March Movement concluded peacefully and successfully. Both of these cases share a variety of similarities with the exception of their outcomes; therefore Wright seizes the opportunity to review the genesis and effect of student behavior in 1989 and 1990.

In The Dynamics of Global Dominance David Abernethy advances four main propositions concerning the rise and demise of European overseas empires over the last half-millennium. The first proposition is that the unprecedented and unparalleled success of European states in building overseas empires in the two long phases of expansion (dated with questionable precision from 1415 to 1773 and from 1824 to 1913) was due primarily to the cumulative, synergistic effects of the extended geographical reach, functional specialization, and ability to work in mutually reinforcing ways of European governmental, business, and religious institutions. In each sphere Europeans faced highly effective non-European competitors. But no such competitor could match the European combination of mutually reinforcing advances in all three spheres. This combination was critical in sustaining not just expansion but also colonial consolidation.

Amitav Acharya has produced an innovative and stimulating evaluation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a crucial juncture in that organization's development. Acharya does not shrink from the challenge of measuring ASEAN's rhetoric of regional cooperation against its actual accomplishments, and the theoretical and empirical sophistication that Acharya displays makes this book sure to be a key work on the security and political aspects of ASEAN for academics and policymakers.

Organized Crime and Democratic Governability offers an insightful look at one of the most critical and vexing questions of the contemporary era: To what extent is democratic governance possible when it coexists with organized crime? John Bailey' and Roy Godson's edited volume analyzes the many dimensions of the deeply entrenched obstacles to democratic stability in modern Mexico, perhaps an ideal case study for such an inquiry. The reach of organized crime there has long tended to undermine the very lifeblood of democracy, namely, its procedures. As a result, throughout the sweep of Mexico's postrevolutionary history, the roots of democracy have not been firmly planted. This chronic condition cannot quickly be remedied. Consequently, the editors conclude, organized crime in its various manifestations will continue to present “a significant challenge to democratic governability in Mexico” (p. 218).

From Tribal Village to Global Village does an excellent job of showing how indigenous peoples in Latin America have gone from victims to protagonists in struggles to control their own fate. Like Alison Brysk's previous work on human rights activities in Argentina during the “dirty war,” this book investigates political dynamics involving nonstate actors at the interface between international relations and comparative politics. Key to these dynamics is the idea that “above all, globalization involves the growing presence, use, and salience of information both in national and local struggles and as a newly significant arena of international relations” (p. 12).

The claim is often made by political activists that the international human rights system is dependent upon nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Ann Marie Clark documents this claim with respect to Amnesty International's achievements. The core of the book is a set of three case studies: the development of the Convention against Torture; the creation of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, along with the unfinished story of attempts to produce a convention against disappearances; and the creation of the Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions, followed by the drafting of a UN “Manual” on prevention and investigation of extrajudicial executions. These case studies are not simply presented as empirical accounts of the diplomatic history. They are structured by portraying each as a four-stage political process, in which Amnesty International collated information on the nature of human rights abuses, built consensus around the principle that the pattern of behavior was morally unacceptable, constructed international norms to express this principle as standards of behavior, and then sought to have application of the norms monitored at both the domestic and the international level.