No one will deny John E. Hill's claim that he has written an "unabashedly didactic" book (p. xi). This is not social science, or political theory, or history as it is usually understood by those disciplines. I do not mean that as a criticism, for there is great merit in writing as a concerned citizen-scholar. Hill puts his political cards on the table. He is a self-described "moderate liberal" (p. xi) who wants universal health insur- ance, public funding of elections, more restraints on the corporate sector, a more progressive tax system, more spend- ing on education, and community service programs. He also wants liberals to rethink their attitude toward morality: They need to be more forthright about the importance of morali- ty-social virtue-for the health of the Republic. In addition, Hill does not shy away from telling us that he does not like "individualistic excess" (p. ix), Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan, or the religious Right.

A distinguished political sociologist, Richard F. Hamilton is perhaps best known for Who Voted for Hitler? (1982). More recently his attention has shifted to the broader methodolog- ical issues raised by the empirical claims of sociological macrotheories. This critical study of three versions of Marx- ism-the original statement by Marx and Engels and two rival reformulations, by Eduard Bernstein at the end of the nineteenth century and by Lenin during World War I-is to be seen in the light of this concern.

Feminist theorists have struggled to develop accounts of women's oppression that are historically specific enough to capture the variability in forms of male domination but do not neglect possible transhistorical and transcultural features. A related challenge has been to theorize a feminist subjec- tivity that can anchor an oppositional politics but avoid an overly unified notion of feminist subjectivity, while neverthe- less attending to the patterned effects that women's system- atic location in the social whole may have on their subjectiv- ity.These challenges were the subject of sometimes polemical but mostly fruitful debates throughout the 1980s and 1990s. They have been deeply shaped by two distinct developments. The first is the political struggles and theoretical writings of women of color, whose work on subjectivity and male dom- ination has consistently pluralized women's subjectivity as well as historicized and contextualized male domination in relation to other axes of power. The second is postmodern critiques that charge modernist modes of theorizing are governed by either ahistorical metanarratives insufficiently attentive to variation and contingency or essentialist under- standings of subjectivity in either a humanist/liberal/volunta- rist or determinist/Marxist form.

With friends like Edwin Meese and Robert Bork, "jurispru- dence of original intent" (p. 3) needs no enemies. These polemicists have so corrupted originalism by associating it with reactionary ideology and partisan politics that, in Keith Whittington's words, "the task now is to convince critics to take [it] seriously again" (p. xii). Constitutional Interpretation ably performs this task. Whittington's rescue of originalist jurisprudence from its strangest bedfellows in itself is a major contribution to the study of constitutional law. But, although originalism has found a genuine friend, the book's powerful argument against "dismissing originalism as an interpretive method" (p. 162) does not constitute an affirmative defense. Whittington's efforts to make this case are informative and provocative, but they fail. This failure is traceable to serious defects in both the structure and content of the book.

Carsey presents a sound piece of research planted solidly in two fields: voting behavior and state politics. The primary thrust is testing a model of campaign strategy and voter reaction. Carsey takes advantage, as have many recently, of the steadily accumulating state campaign and exit polling data. Although not nearly as rich as the American National Election Survey (ANES) in content, these data provide reliable state samples and an abundance of cases in each state, which the ANES seldom does. We now often can use the states as true social science laboratories of democracy- expanding N without adding the confounding factors that plague across-time comparisons of national elections.

The editors of this timely volume announce at the outset that their aim is to provide a forum for recent scholarship that reacts critically to the previous generation of behavioralists who, since the 1950s, have analyzed the U.S. Supreme Court as little more than an aggregate of the relatively stable and identifiable policy preferences held by individual justices. Specifically, these essays pose a collective "response by a succeeding generation of Supreme Court scholars who are trained in political behavioralism but who have rediscovered the value and importance of understanding institutional contexts" (p. 12).

Major league baseball, unlike other professional sports in the United States, has been exempt from antitrust laws for nearly a century. The reason lies with early state and federal court decisions, of which the most frequently cited is the Supreme Court's Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League opinion, authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1922. Baseball's legal status has been the subject of numerous law review articles and commentaries, historical narratives, and scholarly analyses. Nevertheless, Jerold Duquette claims that there has been no integrated and comprehensive examination of "baseball's unregulated monopoly."

In an era when campaign finance reform is widely discussed by politicians, political scientists, and journalists, Money Matters provides a timely and thoughtful analysis of several reform proposals. The central focus is on the effect that spending limits, matching funds, full public funding, and partial public funding with spending limits would have on electoral competition, voter turnout, and voter involvement in elections to the House of Representatives.

David Lake provides a theoretical framework for under- standing the security choices made by the United States in the twentieth century. He grounds his work in the metaphor that polities may be understood as firms producing security. The fundamental choices before states are unilateralism and cooperation. The former is equated with production within a single firm, and the latter can take several forms. Principal among these are alliances, in which polities act as if they were separate and independent firms entering into joint produc- tion agreements, and empire, which is similar to the integra- tion that takes place in the modern multidivisional corpora- tion. Alliances and empires form the end points of a continuum of security relationships. Alliances are at the anarchy end, as each polity retains full decision authority.

The American political system has many features that set it apart from other governments of the world, but not all are equally apparent. One distinctive aspect is the length and importance of the transition period from one presidential administration to another. In most countries the passage of power occurs almost as soon as the election results are known (consider, e.g., the rapid assumption of power by President Kostunica after Slobodan Milosevic admitted defeat in the September 2000 Yugoslav election), but in the United States roughly ten weeks elapse between the election and inaugu- ration. The American approach, as Charles Jones puts it in this outstanding book, is to transfer power at a "leisurely pace."

Can presidency research do more than probe idiosyncratic cases? Our knowledge of the American presidency and the status of presidency studies in political science both hang on the answer to that question. Indeed, the current research agenda in this field exhibits a confidence that its findings are amenable to generalization and deserve the discipline's ap- probation.

In 1988 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), on behalf of B. H., a 17-year- old youth in foster care, and nearly 20,000 other children forced to live outside their home because of abuse and neglect. Attorneys accused the DCFS, responsible for pro- tecting and placing such children, with violations of Illinois statutes and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. B. H., for example, had been placed in ten different settings despite clear evidence that children require continuity of care for their emotional growth.

Max Neiman provides a concise, well-written, and compre- hensive critical analysis of "the conservative attack on the public sector, especially its explanation for and evaluation of the size and growth of the public sector in the United States" (p. viii). In doing so, however, he only partially fulfills what is promised in the subtitle, namely, explaining why big govern- ment works. Rather than explicitly assess the reasons for goal achievement in a variety of policy areas, as the title implied to me, Neiman focuses on why we have big government and on the various critiques of that size. To be sure, the book is appropriate for upper division and graduate courses in political science, public policy, or public administration.

That the amount and nature of the information reaching the president matters for the choices he makes is hardly disputed, but translating this insight into analysis has been slow work. This is true especially in comparison to other subfields (e.g., legislative studies), which in making use of the new institu- tionalism have stressed information by highlighting the roles institutions play in ameliorating the uncertainty rampant in political decision making. Daniel Ponder's new book, then, is particularly welcome. Good Advice asks some critical ques- tions: What did the president know, and how did he come to know it? Equally important, how did that matter?

Recent calls for public sector reform advocate reinvention, deregulation, reengineering, outsourcing, and privatization to address deficiencies in the classic bureaucratic model and to improve government performance. Reform efforts that seek to capitalize on the advantages offered by the three sectors-public, private, and voluntary-include experiments in public-private policy partnerships. Experience with coop- erative undertakings between the state and for-profit or third-sector service providers spans the last three decades. This book examines the pros and cons of these public-private policy partnerships, isolates the determinants of success or failure across policy spheres, and identifies the circumstances under which cross-sector partnering should be promoted or avoided.

In the late twentieth century, language conflicts became not only a central battle in public policy but also an essential medium for political expression among traditionally margin- alized groups. This is clearly reflected in a host of policy initiatives (from antiimmigrant propositions such as 187 in California, to English-only and antibilingual education move- ments in such states as Arizona, California, Colorado, and Florida) and the proliferation of studies linking language with Latino and Asian American politics (e.g., Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds., The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society, 1998; and Louis De- Sipio and Rodolfo de la Garza, Making Americans, Remaking America: Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1998).

Although political conflict is certainly no stranger to U.S. cities, the contributors to Culture Wars suggest that a new kind of conflict, heavily embued with moral overtones, is surfacing with more frequency on the urban landscape. Battles over abortion, gay and lesbian rights, hate crimes, and the like, are taking their place along side the more traditional disputes associated with service delivery, economic develop- ment, and redistribution of resources. The morality-based nature of these new culture wars has, according to the contributors, created a new type of politics that is evidenced in the way issues are presented, debated, and resolved. These differences are a function of the passion associated with moral claims, the involvement of religious organizations, and the use of nonconventional protest tactics that can be fairly aggressive. These differences between how culture wars play out and politics as usual may render existing theories of local politics insufficient.

Concern about the health of civic life in the United States has generated academic debate, journalist commentaries, several study commissions, and publications by the score. Is civil society in decline, or is it reinventing itself? That is the question addressed from a variety of perspectives by the sociologists and political scientists who contributed to this volume. The chapters, initially prepared for presentation at a conference in September 1997, examine issues at the center of the debate from several theoretical perspectives. The editors organize the contributions under three headings: the roots of civic engagement, civic life in a changing society, and the ironies of contemporary activism.

The Movers and the Shirkers is a critique and extension of a well-cited and important research program: attempts to measure the degree to which legislators shirk, or advance their own policy goals at the expense of those held by their constituents. Such analyses (e.g., Joseph P. Kalt and Mark Zupan, "Capture and Ideology in the Economic Theory of Politics," American Economic Review 74 [June 1984]: 279­ 300; John R. Lott, "Political Cheating," Public Choice 52 [1987]: 169­86) typically assume a principal-agent relation- ship between constituents and elected representatives, and they specify a regression analysis with roll-call behavior as a left-hand side variable and various measures of constituency interests and legislator ideology as right-hand side variables. Previous work (John E. Jackson and John W. Kingdon, "Ideology, Interest Groups, and Legislative Votes," American Journal of Political Science 36 [August 1992]: 805­23) shows that these analyses are bedeviled by measurement and esti- mation issues. Eric Uslaner highlights a more fundamental flaw: By ignoring important and well-understood mechanisms that tie legislators to their constituents, these analyses as- sume what should be tested.

This anthology opens with several compelling first-person narratives of life inside the U.S. military institution, followed by analyses by both military and civilian researchers. The academic contributors approach their topics from different disciplines, including political science, history, sociology, and literature/film. The volume seeks to bridge the gap between those inside the institution and those on the outside (p. ix). The effort to build this bridge began with a series of specialized conferences and workshops on gender and mili- tary culture spanning the 1990s. I participated in several of these and heard some of the contributors to this collection present their research. Other volumes that developed from the conferences are Mary Fainsod Katzenstein's Faithful and Fearless (1998), Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Judith Reppy, Beyond Zero Tolerance (1999), and Francine D'Amico and Laurie Weinstein, Gender Camouflage (1999).