Russell L. Riley offers an insightful account of how American presidents have grappled with race. His main concern is the causal forces that shape the institutional role of the presi- dency in American politics. The discussion centers specifi- cally upon the determinants of presidential policy that affects the advancement of African Americans toward first-class citizenship. Riley asks what operative dictates and constraints shape presidential behavior vis-a -vis racial inequality politics.

The study of political campaigns has an awkward place in political science. At one level, we have grown to accept that "campaigns matter." A growing literature now provides many different tests of this proposition. At another level, a cliche? sometimes mouthed by campaign professionals and journal- ists is that 90% of what campaigns do does not matter-it is the remaining 10% that is critical. The relative accuracy of these proportions aside, this cliche? raises an important question: What is the critical part of modern campaigns that "matters"?

With the exception of Jane Mansbridge's important and groundbreaking analysis of "Shelby," Vermont (Beyond Ad- versary Democracy, 1980), published scientific investigation of face-to-face democracy in the New England town meeting is almost nonexistent. Thus, Zimmerman's volume is not part of a genealogy of scholarship on what I call "real" democracy, to distinguish it from the direct democracy of referenda and initiatives with which it is often confused. For many years his interest has been what he terms (accurately) "law-making by assembled citizens." Given the general misuse of the term town meeting by politicians (which began with Carter and was perfected by Clinton), intent on cloaking a variety of self-serving public relations ploys in the robes of "pure" democracy, Zimmerman provides at the very least a much needed reality check for political scientists. In fact, in the popular American lexicon (and even in the understandings of many political scientists) town meeting has taken on a totally new meaning, as exemplified in Andrew Fergurson's essay ("Ye Olde Town Meeting Gimmick," Time, March 2, 1998).

In this case study of participatory democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Rebecca Neaera Abers examines one aspect of the participatory democracy program implemented by the Par- tido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Workers' Party, in Porto Alegre: the participatory budget process. In that process, people at the grassroots make policy decisions that the government is committed to implement. The PT took office in 1989, and Abers follows its participatory budget process from 1989 to 1997.

Ofra Bengio's book is a scholarly and methodical endeavor to analyze the way in which Ba`thi Iraq (1968-present) has been using (or misusing) the Arabic language, symbolism, history, and myths in order to legitimize its rule and policies. Bengio demonstrates how language has been twisted and manipu- lated in an attempt to terrorize political enemies, paralyze and enchant the vast majority of the Iraqis, induce them to perform or tolerate atrocities, and risk their lives in battle for leader and country. Sometimes, the regime is entrapped in its own rhetoric. The book shows how discourse, art, and symbols have been used to construct a cult of personality for Saddam Husayn, unmatched in the contemporary Middle East.

Merle Bowen investigates the politics of the changing rela- tionship between state and peasantry in Mozambique, prin- cipally through the elaboration of a case study, the Ilha Josina Machel in the southern province of Maputo. The book takes as point of departure the "developmental" period of Portuguese colonialism, from the early 1960s until the present day, although the main focus is on 1975-83. This is useful, because that period gives us a relatively clear insight into the reality of the Frelimo government's policies of socialism in the countryside, before all aspects of Mozam- bique's political economy were inundated by the war prose- cuted by Renamo with South African backing. Although there has been a marked increase of research interest in local-level studies recently, few works that take a similar approach treat this period in such detail. For all those interested in the realities of rural socialism generally, or specifically Mozambique's Frelimo period, this book will be valuable indeed.

Democracy is in vogue it seems. Everywhere in the world, the forces opposed to democracy seem to be in retreat, and the number of states calling themselves democracies is increas- ing. There are exceptions, of course: parts of Africa, tortured Burma, all over the Middle East, some aging Communist oligarchies, a few proud holdouts in sultanates and mountain monarchies. But they are increasingly anachronisms in the end-of-history world. Or are they? The literature is replete with controversy on the definition, durability, inevitably, and universality of democracy. Into this controversy comes a new book that takes direct aim at the literature of the past decades and provides a badly needed comparative analysis of some of the states in South Asia. Maya Chadda's goals are clear and ambitious: to bring the neglected experience of South Asia to the attention of a wider audience, in the context of the most central debates about the nature of democracy.

Both of these books seek to explain the failure or shortcom- ings of Russia's postcommunist democratic experiment. Both are critical of much of the transition literature within political science, and both identify certain features that make the prescriptions of that literature problematic within the Rus- sian and Soviet contexts. But they anchor their criticisms in contrasting explanations of the current travails. One is rooted in the importation of inappropriate models of economic and social development under Western prodding; the other points to the weakness of Russia's nascent civil society and the opportunities lost by political leaders to strengthen it. They provide opposing views not only of the causal processes underlying failed or incomplete democratization within Rus- sia but also to some extent of the purposes of the social scientific enterprise itself.

Ruth Collier has written an important contribution to the literatures on democracy and on labor, one that should reorient much discussion and work on democratization. Collier makes a powerful case that labor has been a far more important and decisive actor in redemocratization than con- ventionally thought, and her reconceptualization of the cases on this basis yields an important new typology of regime transitions. The book casts a wide empirical net, examining the contribution of labor to the emergence of democracy in numerous countries in both the Americas and Europe.

Venezuelan politics attracted little attention from political scientists for thirty years after the defeat of the fidelista guerrillas in the 1960s, but there has been a surge of interest in recent years. The country retained civilian, elected govern- ment through a dark period of authoritarianism in Latin America, which seemed to make it a good candidate for deriving lessons about transitions to democracy. In the 1990s, however, the democratic system entered into crisis. Venezu- ela experienced urban riots, two unsuccessful coups, removal of a president from office before completion of his term, rising electoral abstention, collapse of the traditional parties at the heart of the system, and the election of a coup leader to the presidency. Attention shifted from what went right to what went wrong. These books help us understand the limitations of the Venezuelan democratic model.

Although Japan scholars have long been aware that media institutions facilitate state efforts to curtail the free flow of information within Japanese society, Closing the Shop is the first comprehensive treatment of this important topic. The book was well worth the wait.

In this well-informed, theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, and highly innovative book, and in related articles that appeared recently in Political Research Quarterly (53 [March 2000]: 7-36) and World Development (28 [Octo- ber 2000]: 1821-35), Pierre Englebert proposes and tests the hypothesis that variations in vertical and horizontal state legitimacy account for variations in the developmental capac- ity and economic growth of African states and of Africa in comparison to other world regions. Developmental capacity, which combines an index of specific economic policies (em- phasizing a free market and human capital) and an index of good governance, is the crucial intervening variable between state legitimacy and growth.

Comparative political economy has been transformed since the end of the 1970s. The explanatory value of class conflict, the power resources of social classes, and the social base of particular national models of political economy have been replaced by an emphasis upon the role of institutions in explaining both how contemporary political economies func- tion and their capacity to manage international economic integration. The fruits of this institutional turn have now emerged into a fully fledged new approach, as evidenced by the volume under review, by Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (edited by Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John D. Stephens, 1999), and by a forthcoming volume, Varieties of Capitalism, edited by Peter Hall and David Soskice. These three books overlap to a great degree in both theoretical approach and list of contributors.

Through an opening epigraph from Norman Maclean, Mar- garet Levi proposes a vivid analogy between the complexities of conscription and of fire: In both cases many causes intersect to produce particular events, yet the analyst's job is to tease truth from complexity. Seeking to clarify costly political consent in general, Levi astutely analyzes resistance to and compliance with calls to military service, a quintessen- tial case in which individuals face the choice of bearing large costs on behalf of benefits they will share little or not at all and to which their participation will make little difference. In the process, without ever quite saying so, she batters the postulate of universal self-interest that undergirds so much of rational choice argument in political science.

Gail Kligman analyzes the reproductive policies of the Ceausescu regime and the responses of experts and the population to those policies. Drawing on extensive interviews with ordinary men and women as well as experts and on archival research, the author provides a wealth of informa- tion about demographic trends and reproductive policies in Romania from the outset of the communist era to the violent overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in late 1989. Kligman traces the way in which communist leaders used legislation, measures to "protect" women in the workplace, propaganda, and control of the media and other sources of information to propagate their desired model of women and influence reproductive choices. She analyzes the role of key profession- als, such as demographic experts and, particularly, physicians and other medical personnel, in the making and implement- ing of reproductive policies. She also considers the role of international actors, including the United States, in perpet- uating the Ceausescu regime.

nyone who watched Soviet television before 1985, the contrast between then and now could not be more striking. As with all Soviet media, television was centrally controlled and used by the Communist Party to communicate only the information deemed necessary by its leaders. The news was sanitized, dreadfully dull, and politically correct. The collapse of communist rule in Russia opened up space for alternative sources of political information to develop. News content today is certainly more lively and attractively packaged, but the emergence of autonomous, multiple sources of informa- tion has only partially been realized, as Ellen Mickiewicz makes clear. Furthermore, an unfortunate legacy of the Soviet period remains alive in contemporary Russian practice. It is the principal thesis of this remarkably well-informed and readable book that now, as then, television news is a "zero-sum" game: Whoever controls the news, wins. Consequently, control over television news remains the critical mechanism for gaining and holding political power, and it is the consuming goal of those who would do so.

The media have always been major players in transitions from authoritarian rule toward democracy. For all the dis- cussion of the media as actors in these transitions and as the objects of political tug-of-wars, little has actually been said about how the media work or how they have been managed. The Rational Politician is the first look at the media in the East European transitions from communism to democracy.

From time out of mind, people have killed, maimed, and oppressed one another in two sorts of conflicts: over material interests (real estate, slave labor, agricultural surplus, war booty, and so on) and over what Max Weber would have termed "ideal interests" (conflicts over ultimate meanings, salvation, principles of justice, definitions of social order). Barrington Moore's classical and landmark study, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), explored the first mode of conflict in the making of modern nation-states. All social scientists are forever in his debt for that effort. It ranks as one of the most important contributions to the fields of comparative and historical sociology.

This intriguing volume is a direct challenge to Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979); by inserting "ideology" into the title, Parsa claims that Skocpol left out something important. He makes good on his effort to dem- onstrate the importance of ideology in recent Third World revolutions, but the book offers far more than that. Several authors have compared the Iranian and Nicara- guan revolutions, which occurred in 1979, but to my knowl- edge this is the first book-length treatment to add the Philippines revolution against Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Stephen Padgett is highly regarded for his scholarship on parties and other aspects of politics in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the present work he focuses on the "hesitant" emergence of associational activity in the postcommunist societies of eastern and central Europe, with particular emphasis on economic interest groups in eastern Germany. His tightly written book seeks to document and, above all, explain this state of affairs. The retarded growth of interest groups in the region is an important and relatively neglected topic, at both the theoretical and empirical levels aimed for here. It is also a development that has run counter to the once widely expected emergence of a vigorous pluralist civil society that would accompany the region's transition to market economics and democratic politics.