As the distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor notes in his foreword to this book, liberal democratic political systems are becoming more diverse in terms of the cultural identities of their citizens, yet their legitimacy, unlike that of autocratic states or empires, depends on maintaining a certain level of unity and homogeneity. Without it, neither democratic participation, nor a regime of equal rights, nor even satisfactory economic performance appears to be possible. The effort to create a semblance of coherence and common purpose while recognizing and accepting unavoidable diversity, a theme that has dominated Canadian political discourse and practice for a century and a half, has become a preoccupation for much of the world. Yet there are more questions than answers. Consociationalism, a fashionable concept a generation ago, no longer has many supporters among social scientists. Federalism, originally invented in the United States for quite a different purpose, can accommodate conflicting nationalisms only if a precise geographical boundary can be drawn between them—and not always then.

This interesting and insightful book on the political economy of wildlife policy in Africa is an important contribution to the literature not only on African politics but also on the role that institutions play in shaping behavior and decisions. Although wildlife may not occupy the same centrality in African economies as oil and precious metals do, it is a crucial natural resource that earns countries, especially in eastern and southern Africa, significant revenue. Few political scientists have paid attention to this sector. No one has really approached it from a political economy perspective. Yet the struggle over access to natural resources in Africa is very much a political matter. Gibson's well-crafted and thorough study fills this gap. Its main contribution to the discipline at large is its focus on the distributive nature of institutions. The latter do not just produce collective or public goods. They also serve individual interests differentially. By concentrating on the strategic interaction of individuals within institutions, Gibson, following in the tradition of Douglass North and Robert Bates, identifies the intended and unintended consequences of policy decisions made with regard to the use and conservation of wildlife in Africa.

“Do we need yet another comparative study of revolutions?” (p. 5; emphasis in original), Jeff Goodwin asks in this eagerly (and long) anticipated and important new book, which is destined to influence scholars in several disciplines and fields. The answer, as this volume makes abundantly clear, is “yes,” and few will be disappointed with this well-written, accessible, and compelling volume, the most nuanced and sophisticated argument yet for the state-centered (but, pace Goodwin, not structuralist; see p. 53) approach, and worthy heir to Theda Skocpol's (1979) still paradigmatic States and Social Revolutions. But therein lies the rub: Rather than the first book of the (putative) emergent fourth generation of scholars of revolution(s), this is likely the last of the third generation. Goodwin concedes he has “largely moved beyond” (p. xvi) the perspective he articulates here, and he, along with John Foran, is one of the most likely suspects to produce the next paradigmatic statement on revolutions. This, then, would seem the third generation's crowning glory; given the long gestation period and the prolific Goodwin's many and impressive contributions to matters revolutionary, this is almost more a legend than a book.

The volume and quality of the scholarship generated of late on the question of the “varieties of capitalism” has been truly outstanding. We now know far more than we ever did about the internal workings of particular national economies, and about the determinants of what Angus Maddison once termed the “proximate” causes of their competitive strengths and weaknesses. That knowledge has come in part from the work of a talented set of comparative political scientists and industrial sociologists, many of whom participate in this collection. It has also come from the work of a set of economists and economic historians with sufficient professional courage and intellectual integrity to operate at (or even beyond) the edge of their notoriously narrow and institutionally blind discipline. But because that knowledge has come from so many sources, and because so much of it has entered the public domain in the form of discrete case studies or collections of relatively disconnected essays, what the subfield now needs, more than anything else, is the consolidation of a set of organizing frameworks and governing concepts designed to go beyond proximate causes to a fuller understanding of the dynamics of competitive advantage. This is why Peter Hall and David Soskice's much-heralded collection of essays, Varieties of Capitalism, is so important a milestone in the development of the subdiscipline of comparative political economy. At long last it gives us what Pepper D. Culpepper calls here an “analytical tool kit” (p. 303): a collection of essays built around the powerful conceptual devices of “comparative institutional advantage” and “institutional complementarities”—concepts deployed to explain “how the institutions structuring the political economy confer comparative advantages on a nation, especially in the sphere of innovation” (p. v).

Alexander Hicks has written one of the most important works in the past thirty years on the development of income security policies in democratic capitalist states. (Hicks equates income security policies with “welfare states”—a point I will revisit later.) If this were not sufficient, the book also is the most significant comparative public policy study I have read. Based on years of reflection, scholarship and teaching, it covers, not merely cites, a wide range of literatures. It is extremely sensitive to particular historical experiences. It is theoretically informed. Most impressively, it is methodologically sophisticated and imaginative. And the book is concise and well–written. In short, it is a model of what exciting comparative research can be.

In 1964, Brazil embarked on one of Latin America's longest experiments in modern military authoritarianism. Ollie Johnson's Brazilian Party Politics seeks to understand one of the important antecedents to the coup by looking at the political party system during the 1945–64 period. While the book does not succeed in demonstrating a strong causal connection between party politics and the coup, it does provide a very interesting new perspective on party politics and realignment, looking beyond the more immediate electoral indicators of the Brazilian party system.

This is an ambitious and innovative study of the processes of democratization evident in Greece after 1974. It has two major distinctions. Firstly, it is based on an extensive range of personal interviews with some of the protagonists involved, as well as on archival searches. Secondly, the empirical analysis is placed within relevant theoretical frames, and these are used to draw out relevant comparisons with other European states. The book serves, therefore, as both a general introduction to the turbulent history of the period and a useful source for comparative analysis of democratization processes. The book is highly accessible and readable. With these qualities, it is likely to become the definitive account of the transition to democracy in Greece. Many scholars and students will benefit from it.

Over the past decade, while the United States effectively decided that liberalism could not accommodate quotas or affirmative action plans designed to alleviate gender and racial inequality, Europe decided that liberalism could accommodate a form of positive discrimination. As the U.S. Supreme Court systematically rolled back affirmative action plans and the state of California led the initiative to curtail government and educational affirmative action, countries like France, Germany, and Norway were implementing a variety of parity policies at both the constitutional and political levels. The parity movement that gained strength in Europe in the 1990s called for equal representation of both men and women in elected assemblies. Methods for achieving parity ranged from reserving parliamentary seats for female legislators by means of constitutional change to legal gender quotas in party lists and party rules. The editors of this volume point out that the Europeans have implemented these electoral reforms with “little public outcry” and “no manifestations of mass protests.”

Each of these books is, in its own way, a tour de force; each provides the best book-length account and analysis available to date on its subject. Michael McFaul's book offers a major contribution to thinking on regime change in general, as well as a fine account and analysis of Russia's transition from Sovietism. Thomas Remington's book, which investigates the nascence and internal operation of the Russian legislature, powerfully advances our understanding of the Russian parliament and the formation of political institutions more generally. Both books are scholarly and sophisticated, but each is also elegantly written, well organized, and accessible to the nonspecialist. Both authors were present at the creation of the new Russian political order, and each book is deeply informed by extensive interviews and first-hand observation.

Studies of local politics have often narrowly focused on elites, the role of competing interest groups, or the influence of the business community in making key decisions. Nelson's comparative study raises the level of discourse by drawing our attention to the often overlooked role of blacks in municipal politics. In comparing Boston and Liverpool the study expands our understanding of the similarities between racial politics in the United States and in Great Britain.

If you remain befuddled, perplexed, or even a bit hazy about why scholars have shifted in the last decade from talking about “government” to talking about “governance,” this is the volume for you. Debating Governance, edited by Jon Pierre, brings together a diverse group of scholars to analyze the meaning and value of this concept within their respective subfields. The title of the volume may, however, be ambiguous. These scholars are not debating the meaning and value of the term governance among themselves. The contributors to the volume generally agree that governance is a useful and valuable concept. Despite differences in emphasis, perspective, and language, the authors generally agree about why we must shift from talking about “government” to talking about “governance.” The debate, if there is one, is with those who would deny or ignore fundamental changes in the way in which we govern ourselves over the last several decades.

As the recent political meltdowns in Venezuela and Argentina made clear, a vast gap persists between elite behavior and mass attitudes in much of Latin America. Scholarly understanding of this gap—and its political implications—would benefit from more fine-grained, yet theoretically informed, studies of nonelites. Nancy Powers's Grassroots Expectations of Democracy and Economy is one such study. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 residents of two lower-income neighborhoods in Argentina's federal capital, Powers examines how poor people understand their own interests. She argues that people experience poverty in vastly different ways, and this variation has important implications for political behavior. Thus, to understand how poor people view the relationship between their own material conditions and government policy, one must examine “the conditions themselves and how people live with them” (p. 33). This kind of inductive analysis has important and well-known limitations, particularly for studies—such as this one—based on a small sample size. Yet given how little we continue to know about the relationship between mass attitudes and macrolevel politics in Latin America, such a “bottom up” approach should be welcomed. To the extent that fine-grained inductive research generates insights that 1) are unlikely to emerge out of larger-n studies and 2) challenge or refine dominant theoretical assumptions, it can be extremely fruitful. This is the case with important sections of the book.

In this book David W. Roberts provides an interesting descriptive account of recent Cambodian politics. The guiding principle of his study is the evaluation and implementation of the Paris Peace Agreement (PPA), which was signed in 1993. The main thesis in the book is that the content of the PPA mainly served the interests of international actors such as the United States and China, without taking into account the Cambodian political reality. In Roberts's view, the PPA developed from the Western ideal of liberal democracy, with multiparty elections as its central component and with total disregard for the Cambodian political context.

Several years ago, not long before the signing of the Oslo agreement, I was in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. As I was walking through the camp with a male friend, a woman whom I did not know approached me. She gently took my arm as if we were intimate friends, pulled me close, and said, “I have nothing left to feed my children but black milk.” She then turned and walked away, leaving as imperceptibly as she had approached. My male friend immediately dismissed her as crazy. Yet I have never forgotten this woman or our momentary but wrenching encounter. It was not only the poignancy of her words that struck me, but their poetry. Her message to me was one of ultimate despair: I can no longer nourish my children. What good am I?

Judith Shapiro has written the first overview of environmental history of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong (1949–76). It is a grim history indeed. Instead of employing a more common temporal approach, Shapiro identifies four major themes leading to environmental degradation, and uses compelling case studies to illustrate those themes. The four themes are political repression and suppression of dissenting opinion; utopian urgency; dogmatic uniformity; and war preparation and forcible relocation of the population to remote areas.

Richard Snyder's well-crafted study substantiates what most political scientists suspected all along: that neoliberal reforms lead to new institutions of market governance, rather than to unregulated markets. Snyder sheds light on this understudied topic by examining the reregulation of the coffee sector by four state governments after the Mexican government dismantled the Instituto Mexicano del Café (INMECAFE), the state-owned enterprise that dominated the coffee industry during the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s, when deregulation began, INMECAFE was providing production supports, price controls, and government-managed marketing channels for nearly 200 thousand small coffee producers. Most of these producers were located among the poorest states in southern Mexico.

The Politics of the Spirit is Timothy Steigenga's long-awaited quantitative study of religious affiliation and political behavior in Central America. What he has done in this spare and conscientious study is to take to task the “conventional wisdom” about Protestantism in Central America. This is a formidable endeavor, given the flood of scholarly literature that has been produced by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists about Protestantism, and especially Pentecostalism, in Latin America over the past two decades. Because Pentecostalism seemed to emerge in Central America during the region's political crisis of the late twentieth century, much of this literature carried with it a highly deterministic subtext, defined by Max Weber and by models of political behavior borrowed from the United States and European experiences.

The politics of neoliberal reform in Latin America has produced a number of impressions that are more or less widely held, but not necessarily entirely accurate. For example, many critics of the neoliberal reform process see it as a creature of Washington and Wall Street—views of economic development imposed on vulnerable, debt-ridden Latin American governments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank play crucial roles as carriers of the “Washington Consensus” and enforcers of its policy prescriptions. In this view, insulated technocrats—often with U.S. economics degrees—implement these essentially unpopular programs without consultation, oversight, or any societal participation. “Delegative democracy” and populations battered by a decade or more of debt and inflation help explain the extent to which these unelected and unaccountable technocrats have been able to promote this agenda. A narrow electoral coalition, anchored by wealth holders and conservative ideologues, has maintained the political space for these insulated technocrats to continue, despite deep opposition from societal groups such as labor.

In this thoroughly researched, well-organized, and clearly written work, John Turner raises important questions of comparative politics. The book is packed with facts and informed by ideas. You may well disagree with his conclusions, as I do. But you must give him credit for the seriousness of his concerns and his willingness to present the evidence, even though it can sometimes be used to support a different interpretation. “Over the past forty years,” he writes, when stating his central conclusion, “Europe has transformed the nature of British politics and Tory politics in particular” (p. 1). Contrary to a view common among political scientists that foreign policy normally has far less influence on electoral behavior than on domestic policy, he finds that Britain's relation to European integration has “gradually…moved to the heart of the domestic political agenda” (p. 1), radically altering the balance of power between the two main parties. As the Euroskeptical champions of national independence, the Conservatives have become “increasingly beleaguered over the issue,” thereby making it possible for Labour “to use Europe as a way of revitalizing the party's programme and image” (p. 2). He clearly would like to see terminal decline for the Conservatives and continued success for a social democratic Britain in a similarly collectivist Europe.

The essays in this ambitious volume take as their foil the democratic peace hypothesis: the claim that liberal democracies, while still going to war against nonliberal states, rarely wage war on one another. “This volume challenges the received international wisdom about democracy, liberalism, and war,” write the editors in the Introduction. “The democratic peace, with its transhistorical causal law based on fixed definitions of democracy and war and a nation-state ontology of the international, is far too simplistic a frame from which to analyze the various historical and contemporary configurations of democracy, liberalism, and war” (p. 2).