This is a book about a man who may be considered “the twentieth century's last example of a ‘pure’ charismatic leader” (p. 5). With these words, Daniel Brumberg begins to analyze the thoughts and legacy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), who came to power in Iran in February 1979. In his introduction, the author maintains that his study provides “an accurate, objective, yet sociologically empathetic evaluation of the very complex process of ideological change in the Islamic Republic of Iran” (p. 8).

Since the 1980s, global financial integration and the rise of neoliberalism have significantly changed the terrain on which European social democratic parties operate. However, fierce debate persists over the evaluation of these changes. Some observers—from widely differing political standpoints—insist that social democracy and the free movement of capital across national boundaries are fundamentally incompatible. It follows that the only options for social democratic parties are either to embrace neoliberalism and dismantle much of the welfare state or organize concerted action to reshape the global financial architecture. An opposing group of analysts are equally adamant that while the terrain has certainly become more difficult, it is still possible for Social Democrats to preserve much of the welfare state and even launch new policy initiatives.

Over the past decade the study of environmental justice has sparked considerable debate, with conflict often exacerbated by conceptual and definitional muddles, scarcity of pertinent data, and disagreement over which methods to employ. This book by the late James Lester and his colleagues is unlikely to diminish the controversy. Yet, as a comprehensive attempt to clear out the conceptual underbrush and bring hard data to bear on difficult empirical questions, the book merits attention by all those concerned with issues of environmental equity. The preliminary findings have been presented at conferences from 1994 on, and many are already familiar with this research. As the authors note, however, they began with a skeptical posture toward the strident assertions made regarding environmental justice. In the end, they reconsidered that position and found much evidence to support concern over environmental inequities in U.S. society.

In recent years more attention has begun to be paid to the different forms of women's engagement with the conventional political arena in Latin America. This interest partly reflects the impact of transitions to democracy and the demobilization of social movements. But it also reflects a change of approach by many of the scholars examining women's political activities as they have reassessed the importance of institutions and the salience of “politics.”

Nearly four decades ago, in a path-breaking book, Aaron Wildavsky taught us, among other things, that “in the most integral sense the budget lies at the heart of the political process” (The Politics of the Budgetary Process, 1964, p. 5). Building on Wildavsky's study, many scholars have contributed to our understanding of various aspects of budget policy and politics. Some have discussed the role of trust funds in the federal budget, but none have made them the central focus of their research. Eric Patashnick fills an important void in the literature by explaining why trust funds are created and how they affect deliberation over tax and spending decisions. Using the trust fund mechanism as a point of reference, Patashnik also tests theories of policy history, public choice, and institutionalism.

Standing the assumptions and causal propositions of established theories on their head, with an eye to refining them or pointing us to other theories, is a fruitful path to quickening the intellectual pulse, to reinvigorating a field of study, and to contributing to knowledge. The Other Mirror makes an eloquent and persuasive case for midrange theorizing as a tool for revitalizing area studies in general and Latin American studies in particular. If area studies are to recover from their marginality in the general disciplines, area specialists must once again engage the theory-building enterprise central to the disciplines that house them. By concentrating on midrange analysis, area studies have real contributions to make to general theory.

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to underperform the world's developing regions, remaining a region of pronounced economic stagnation at correspondingly frightful human and social costs. Exactly why this is so has been the subject of extensive debate both among academics and within the policy community. Since most sub-Saharan African countries have been implementing neoliberal economic reforms, there has been particularly heated discussion about whether or not these policies have helped to improve the economic environment.

Nearly 15 years has elapsed since the World Commission on Environment and Development—the so-called Brundtland Commission—popularized the idea of “sustainable development.” The phrase turned out to be unusually slippery, providing both political cover and ammunition for almost anyone engaged in debates about the global environment and/or development. Indeed, scholars and policymakers of all theoretical or ideological stripes found creative ways to employ the phrase “sustainable development” to support a wide array of arguments in these discussions.

Peretti's book purports to refute conventional constitutional scholarship about the dangers of a political Supreme Court, lauding such a political nature as supportive of the peculiar brand of democracy practiced in America. It seems, in large part, that she is quite successful in doing so, although I am certain that it is far easier to convince me of such a notion than it would be to convince the legal scholars whom Peretti so vehemently attacks.

The approach to the design and revision of electoral districts in Canada is quite different from that found in the United States, despite the two countries' sharing of the same basic first-past-the-post electoral system. As John Courtney notes in his careful study of the topic, in Canada the emphasis in defining electoral districts, or constituencies or ridings, has been underpinned by concepts such as “community of interest” and “effective representation,” which encompass a wide range of political and social considerations—many local in nature—and which permit substantial deviation from the principle of one person, one vote. At the federal level, the allowable deviation in the size of constituencies can be plus or minus 25% within any given province, with the possibility of even greater variances under special circumstances. At the level of provincial electoral systems, the variances can be even larger, in part due to the fact that in certain provinces the ratio of urban to rural seats is specified in law. At the same time, the actual process of designing and reconfiguring the boundaries of constituencies, in the hands of independent, arm's-length commissions for the past 40 years, has been remarkably free of direct partisan influence. In fact, given the rather tattered state of current Canadian parliamentary democracy, characterized by one-party dominance in the federal parliament and a precipitous decline in voter turnout over the past three elections, the institution of arms-length boundary commissions stands out as something that works well and enjoys broad respect.

This book is a collection of essays from a 1996 conference that brought together a number of political sociologists to discuss an article from 1991 by the coorganizers, Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, originally published in International Sociology. They argued that the collapse of blue-collar industries and other changes in occupational and income structures associated with postindustrial social stratification had lead to a breakdown of class politics. Two years later, the journal published a rebuttal by Mike Hout, Clem Brooks, and Jeff Manza that class conflict remained important but that the political parties ignored it. The two articles and a 1993 response by Clark and Lipset are republished here together with a series of response papers written for the 1996 conference. Hout et al. criticized Clark and Lipset for failing to distinguish between class as a social phenomenon and the political representation of class. “Class interests may remain latent in the political arena,” they wrote, “but this does not mean that they do not exist” (p. 64).

This is surely the most ambitious and the most accomplished study of affluent post-World War II democratic welfare states. It uses statistical, case study, and comparative historical methods to describe and explain the course of social welfare policy over the second half of the twentieth century in 16 nations. Quantitatively, the study examines social insurance and service programs, major public expenditure and revenue aggregates, and an array of fine-grained indicators of state redistributive and safety net outcomes, from 1960 through 1994. Somewhat more qualitatively, the study extends its reach to encompass job and gender, labor market, and educational policies over the whole 1945–1996 period. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods of explanatory analysis, the work assesses various accounts of welfare state development and crisis, in particular, its authors' institutionally amplified, class-analytical political resource theory.

The titles of these books point both to their common concern and to the difference between them. Still Fighting underscores the extent to which Latin American women (in this case, Nicaraguans) are still struggling, from a disadvantaged position, to achieve recognition of their own personal value and identity, as well as a better social, political, and economic position. Empowering Women underscores, instead, the extent to which women's struggle is about achieving power in the form of legal title to land. The former stresses gender identity while the latter emphasizes personal empowerment. The first accentuates setbacks experienced and the work still to be done; the latter highlights accomplishments while acknowledging that much work remains. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon locate their work within gender studies in Chapter 1, stating their orientation toward redistribution rather than recognition (p. 9). Although Katherine Isbester does not refer to gender studies, her work is about the struggle for identity and the role it plays in strengthening a social movement.

This is a learned and intriguing book covering the span of modern history of East Central Europe as well as the Balkans. The scope of the book is broad, including various theoretical approaches, historical analysis, and a rich discussion of economics. There is a particularly interesting description of technological innovations' impact on the region's economic and political structure. Unlike some earlier books on the region, which tended to treat Eastern Europe as a region outside the international context, Andrew Janos's work does an excellent job of both relating the impact of events in the “center” of the international system on the region and providing an outstanding comparison to Latin America, the other quasi-“peripheral” region of the international system during the last 300 years.

For political scientists, the world of politics is often comprised of policy markets and aggregated data points. Regression models, actor preferences, and game structures are disciplinary norms. For political professionals, however, politics often has a strongly militaristic bent: It is war by other means. John Pitney analyzes political affairs in the way that political professionals commonly do, using armed conflict as a metaphor to understand complex political phenomena.

These two books deal with the legacy of apartheid for South Africa's democracy, approaching the problems posed by this legacy from differing perspectives about the role of the state. Pierre du Toit, in a thoughtful and well-researched book, addresses the problem of violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Peace in a society with a history of violence needs to be nurtured, he contends, and the state must play a central role.

In 1999, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, was awarded a large grant to fund a survey-based study of the 2000 presidential election. In anticipation of that study, and to help in its design, a colloquium was held in the Fall of 1999, titled “What's a Good Election Study, and What Are Election Studies Good for?” The chapters contained in Election Studies: What's Their Use? are the product of that colloquium.

Being one of a handful of opinion surveys conducted in China, this book should be of interest not only to China specialists but also to students of public opinion, political culture, and survey research. In 1990 and 1996, a joint team of American (University of Michigan) and Chinese (National Beijing University) scholars conducted surveys of the opinions of Chinese peasants and rural cadres in four Chinese counties in north and south China (in the provinces of Hebei, Hunan, Anhui, and the special municipality of Tianjin) concerning economic and political reforms in the post-Mao years. This book represents a partial analysis of the surveys.

This important new study argues that American labor markets have been and are governed by employers to a degree unique among Western capitalist democracies; that this pattern of governance is the outcome of crucial struggles among unions, employers, and middle-class labor reformers from the Civil War to the New Deal; and that American political institutions strongly shaped the struggles and their outcome. In the nineteenth century, all Western countries largely protected employer control of hiring, firing, wages, hours, and working conditions, but in the twentieth century nations other than the United States began to curb employer prerogatives and extend worker protection in the form of labor regulations, trade union and collective bargaining laws, public management of labor supply and demand, and work insurance (the four major types of policy in Robertson's framework). In the United States, fewer such protections were established, and the fragmented federal and state labor policies that were enacted were often undermined by lax enforcement or court rulings. On the eve of the New Deal, Robertson shows, U.S. employers had a degree of autonomy in labor markets unparalleled in European and other industrialized countries.

A decade after the epochal events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, we have come to see them not as quasi miracles the way we did then but almost as prosaic way stations in the ever-present process of societal change. To be sure, there has been a stream of often pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of comparative politics and political sociology, with a special emphasis on social movements, civil society, the transition from authoritarian to democratic societies, and the complex consolidation of the latter that has rightly contributed to the demystification of these events. Yet, as citizens as well as scholars, we still remain so riveted by what happened in those few years in East Central Europe that the point of diminishing returns potentially afflicting additional research and writing on the subject remains distant.