Political consultants have become an omnipresent part of the election landscape. Almost no prominent campaign emerges without a group of paid advisors who raise money, poll, design ads, and craft messages for the candidate. Yet despite the extensive visibility of campaign consultants, few empirical studies exist that attempt to measure the impact of this important player in American elections.

James M. Goldgeier makes a major contribution to the contemporary case study literature concerning American foreign policy formation. Based on extensive interviews with more than 75 key participants (William Perry, Richard Holbrooke, John Shalikashvili, Leon Panetta, Anthony Lake, Strobe Talbott, and so forth), Goldgeier reconstructs a richly detailed account of the policy process that culminated in the decision to expand the NATO alliance eastward. The study illuminates the complex interplay of political considerations, bureaucratic interests, and individual preferences and skills (even chutzpah) that led to the admission of the first tier of new NATO member nations in Eastern/Central Europe.

Jeremy Zilber and David Niven bolster a brief but cogent argument with evidence that news coverage of Congress has been “racialized” to the detriment of African-American congressmen and congresswomen, that African-American members of Congress are less favorably portrayed, less likely to be associated with a diverse agenda, and portrayed as more marginal than Caucasian members, factors other than race being equal (p. 90). By implication, the argument extends to all minority political activists and public officials. It also implies that constituencies represented by African-American politicians are greatly disadvantaged in the political process.

Few public policy issues have drawn more popular attention, generated more media commentary, or produced more books than the national debate over the dark fate of Social Security and Medicare. In a new book, noted policy scholar Joseph White argues that the “entitlement crisis” and the future insolvency projected by so many experts, politicians, and opinion makers are myths that badly need exploding. White insists that although we should be very concerned about the viability of each of these two essential government programs, we should not be carried away by the hysteria amplified by radical reformers and saviors of every political coloration. Rather, we should attempt to formulate a clear-eyed analysis of the purposes and constraints of social insurance that will produce genuine programmatic solutions that do not radically weaken the nation's social safety net.

Alice Amsden is one of the founders of the “statist” or “revisionist” school of East Asian economic development. Her earlier book, Asia's Next Giant (1989), refuted claims that growth in South Korea and other Newly Industrialized Countries was simply a function of high investment rates and correct prices, based in turn on the small-government fundamentals of stable, private property rights, macroeconomic stability, and trade liberalization. Amsden, along with others, emphasized the benefits of sector-specific state interventions distinctly at odds with neoclassical prescriptions.

Common pool (or property) resource studies attempt to address the puzzle of managing natural resources highlighted by Garrett Hardin's (1968) Tragedy of the Commons dilemma. In that scenario of an unmanaged commons, a resource (e.g., pasture) made available to a multiplicity of users will result in a free-for-all leading to the destruction of that natural resource. Traditionally, solutions to this resource overuse problem have come in the form of privatization or state control of natural resources.

Studies of interest-group influence on politics and studies of mass participation in politics typically have been quite separate undertakings. With a few notable exceptions, research projects have been designed to examine one or the other, not both, and the influence of interest-group activity on mass political activity is too seldom considered. In this broadly integrative book, Kenneth Goldstein makes a convincing argument for why this should not be the case.

Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card offers a methodologically rich and convincing account of the impact of subtle race cues in contemporary American politics. Although her thesis is a controversial one, Mendelberg develops a careful and cogent argument that racial attitudes can have a substantial effect on candidate evaluations—provided that candidates craft a racial appeal that appears to be about something other than race. She argues that the success of implicit antiblack appeals, ones juxtaposing visual references to race with ostensibly nonracial verbal messages on issues such as crime or welfare, are due to four “A” factors: ambivalence about racial stereotypes, accessibility and priming, awareness of one's reliance on racial attitudes, and the ambiguity of the racial cue.

The difficulty of policing a complex border like that between the United States and Mexico, specifically stemming the flow of illegal drugs and immigration, demonstrates, according to Peter Andreas's insightful and pathbreaking analysis, the challenges associated with globalization, diminished sovereignty, and economic integration between developed and developing economies. In fact, as he notes, intensifying law enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border has had several unintended consequences, including enhancing the incentive and thus the flow of illegal drugs and migrants, which, in turn, create obstacles to the expansion of legal flows. Throughout the book an implicit question emerges: How do you balance the positive gains from globalization with the negative or dark side effects of free trade, that is, drug trafficking and illegal immigration? Taking the dilemma further, how can states in a global, borderless economy promote two contradictory policies simultaneously: strong prohibitionist, law-enforcement policies to enforce state sovereignty and economic neoliberalism and integration?

While most elections in the United States are simultaneous (with all voters casting their ballots on the same day), there are elections, such as the presidential primary system, in which voters cast their ballots over an extended period of time. Sequential voting poses an interesting puzzle for scholars of voting behavior, particularly given the information flow of elections, but also the strategic considerations of what is effectively an iterated process over time. Presidential primaries are essentially a sequence or series of state party races that begin in early February and last until June of a presidential election year. Although not precisely the same as the presidential primary process, mail-in balloting or early voting, whereby some voters, especially stronger partisans, choose to cast their ballots prior to election day, offers another example of sequential voting in the United States.

The Polish philosopher and diplomat Piotr Ogrodzinski has described “civil society” as a weasel word. It is hard to disagree, given that neo-Tocquevillians, Weberians, critical theorists, Christian fundamentalists, and World Bank analysts all unabashedly sing its praises while having completely different referents in mind for the term. Because it concerns itself with the historical development of civil society, rather than with some abstract idealized notion of it, this collection of essays by historians and social scientists is a sorely needed addition to the literature.

This is another in the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series from Kansas, joining such topics as the Salem witchcraft trials, Marbury v. Madison, the Pullman case, and Bakke. The series editors have chosen wisely in making this selection, both in topic and author. Goldstein is the nation's leading expert on legislation and judicial review related to flag desecration. He brings to this project considerable knowledge, prolific publications in this area, and a clarity of voice and focus. There are no provocative and startling new approaches or theories, but that is not the purpose. I highly recommend this book as assigned coursework for college seminars on civil religion, the separation of powers doctrine, First Amendment rights, Supreme Court functioning, or the interplay between politics, the media, and the Constitution. It will work well in classes not only in political science but also in intellectual and cultural history, American studies, philosophy, and communication studies.

For those of us who watch Congress and steep ourselves in its history, there are a handful of theories purporting to explain how and why Congress changes. Political parties behave like cartels gathering power at another's expense. Election-minded members shape Congress to ease the passage of pork-barrel bills and to trade votes. Congress often seems designed to encourage legislators to become policy experts, and their expertise is protected by deference to committees that fairly closely represent the interests of the whole House or Senate. For at least the last 15 years, and in the name of New Institutionalism, full-throated fans of various theories have been arguing over which one is “right.”

The power of social movements to transform what we take for granted and what we contest is beautifully displayed in Faithful and Fearless. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein shows how some protest in American society has moved inside institutions. Particularly, she means, feminist protest: “Less lawbreaking than norm-breaking, these feminists have challenged, discomfited, and provoked, unleashing a wholesale disturbance of long-settled assumptions, rules, and practices…. Sometimes by their mere presence, but more often by claiming specific rights, and by demanding in certain facets the transformation of the institutions of which they are a part, feminists have reinvented the protests of the 1960s inside the institutional mainstream of the 1990s” (p. 7)

This book provides a solid contribution to our understanding of regime transitions, although from an unusual perspective: that of the armed forces of an outgoing dictatorship. Since its inception, the literature on democratization has argued that modes of regime transition (and the actors empowered during this process) have a substantial impact on the success and quality of a new democracy. Craig Arceneaux's central insight is that who retains control of the process in a transition from a military dictatorship depends to a great degree on the cohesion of the armed forces and the coherence of their economic and political strategy. To establish this proposition, Arceneaux adopts an institutionalist approach to examine five cases of transition in South America, all drawn from the period of prolonged military rule that characterized the region during the 1960s and 1970s.

Whoever has spent some time in the Indian state of Panjab and is to some extent acquainted with the East European Gypsies must have concluded that this was their original home. But as in Europe, so also in Panjab, even at the local Chandigarh University where an international conference debated the problem, little is known and understood about Gypsy ethnopolitics or ethnoculture. European interest in the Gypsies at the university level goes back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century, but it focused on regional languages and folklore as, for instance, can be seen in the correspondence between Bogdan P. Hasdeu (Ghijdeu), a Romanian academic, and Franz Miklosich, an Austrian philologist.

This volume purports to explore questions about the changing role of nonprofit organizations in contemporary urban America. The stated theme is to explain how and why such organizations “attempt to sculpt the landscape of urban policy and political action rather than simply react or adapt to it” (p. 1), although the nine articles do not embrace it with equal rigor. The editors, who also contribute a chapter, further state that the text will explore “when and where such efforts are effective and when and where they are not''(p. 1). These are timely and important issues, given the Bush administration's stated goal of increasing reliance on nonprofit organizations.

This work is by a serious scholar who had previously written a fine book on peasant politics in Egypt. Interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world may be dismissed as naive given the notorious reputation of the region for autocracy and dictatorships. Yet Nathan Brown insists on taking constitutional developments in the region seriously, and he meticulously covers most constitutional developments over the span of the last century. But the book could have been easily condensed into a scholarly article. In the first part of the book, for example, which stretches into page 94, he provides the reader with a blow-by-blow account of constitutional developments in select Middle East countries. It contains very few insights, and the author breaks no new grounds; the developments were previously covered in many other works (for example, Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East, 1992).

The publication under review is the outcome of a Princeton University conference entitled “Unemployment's Effects” held in 1997. The themes of the chapters extend widely. Some authors focus on broad discussions of the possibilities for the “European model” to survive in a global economic setting, while others look at specific relations, for example, between unemployment and trade union strength, in just one European country. Some chapters have clear theoretical objectives, while others have a focus on empirical detail and statistical analysis. On the other hand, the majority of the chapters are related by a general positive view on the sustainability of the European model, even in the seemingly hostile environment of the global economy. Although the European welfare states and labor markets are often accused of being inflexible and hampered by “institutional sclerosis,” they may also foster the development of a soft and kind capitalism—or organized managed economy—as Nancy Bermeo puts it in her introduction to the book.

The field of urban politics has been in the theoretical doldrums for some 20 years now. This is not to say there has been a dearth of scholarship; on the contrary, empirical case studies taking political economy, policy, or institutional approaches have been common. But unlike the heyday of the study of the field through the 1970s, there has been no compelling debate that has held the attention of students of American politics and political scientists more generally. Alan DiGaetano and John Klemanski set themselves up for no small task, then, by seeking not simply to establish comparisons between cities in the United States and Great Britain, but to build a new theoretical foundation for the study of city politics and for urban political economy more generally. On the whole, while the authors provide a sweeping vista of the state of the field, the theoretical edifice they build is not solid enough to sustain the weight of their own hypotheses and claims.