The once-formidable Japanese economy has fallen upon hard times. After posting a roughly double-digit rate of real annual growth from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, and generally outperforming the economies of other advanced industrial democracies during the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese economy suffered a prolonged period of stagnation throughout most of the 1990s. Given this dramatic reversal, Bai Gao sets about the ambitious task not only of explaining why the Japanese economy has soured, but of providing a broad institutional framework that underscores the common factors behind the high growth period, the bubble economy of the 1980s, and the collapse of the bubble in the 1990s. To achieve this task, Gao applies what he terms “the logic of reverse reasoning”; he takes the rise and collapse of the bubble economy as the “starting point fortheoretical reasoning,” examining the institutional mechanisms that purportedly produced it. He then works backward in time to reexamine how these institutional mechanisms operated during the high-growth era, and to identify the “environmental changes” that account for the reasons these institutional mechanisms produced such varied outcomes over time (pp. 6–7).

Charles Lees has produced a succinct yet compelling assessment of the Greens' “long march to power” in Germany through a succession of state governments to the Social Democratic–Green national coalition formed following the 1998 Bundestag election. His account is conceptually sound and (apart from several omissions) highly informative. It provides useful insights into the dynamics of SPD–Green politics that will interest German specialists and comparativists alike.

The controversy surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential election has already generated major scholarly work and will do so for years to come. Both works reviewed here were written before the historic judicial events surrounding the November election of 2000. Far from irrelevant, each work offers unique insight into the fundamental rules surrounding political conflict and the historical flow of elections with major social and economic change. As such, we learn much about political science and the struggle over the proper analytical lens for understanding politics.

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.

Market and Community is both more than the sum of its parts and less than what it promises. The book is more than the sum of its parts since it is a more a sequence of independent thoughtful essays than a unitary thesis. It is, however, less than what it promises because the links between the analytic and the empirical chapters are less than perfectly specified.

This book, the product of collaboration by an international team of European social scientists, focuses on the emergence and operation of local partnerships to combat social exclusion in European Union nations. This timely study is built on case analysis of samples of local partnerships in 10 EU nations; seven are given chapter-length treatment in the book. The central goals of the authors are to explain the cross-national diversity in frequency and form of local partnerships and their successes and failures in addressing poverty and social exclusion.

An interesting aspect of life at Duke is the annual construction of our local Brigadoon. The well-ordered but ephemeral tent city is named “Krzyzewskiville,” after Duke's head basketball coach. K-ville appears once a year in the weeks before the game against UNC-Chapel Hill, our arch rival. So many students want to see this game that an elaborate nonprice rationing scheme, based on a queue, has evolved to allocate tickets. “Tenting” students may have to wait two weeks or more to get tickets. The game is in January or early February, so they sleeping outside and try to keep up with their school work despite rain, snow, and subfreezing temperatures at night. Random checks (even in the middle of the night) are conducted by student representatives; if a tent is empty too often it is taken down, and the residents lose their place in the queue.

Daniel Levy and Kathleen Bruhn, leading Mexicanists, use their scholarly expertise to provide a welcome addition to the literature on contemporary Mexican politics. This work is a lucid, well-integrated interpretation of Mexico's recent transformation economically and politically. It benefits from the past research of both authors and from the insights of their Mexican colleague. The book's primary focus, as they argue in the introductory chapter, is the fundamental role of democracy in altering Mexico's developmental path and political discourse.

The essays in this short volume address three themes: the characterization of political campaign television advertising, the need to measure its effects, and the role and implications of issue advertising. This is an ambitious agenda, but the book makes some important contributions to the literature on campaigns and on political ads specifically.

“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 core message of this book comes through clearly in every chapter: Formal political institutions affect economic policymaking and—less directly—policy results. The book advances thinking about how institutions affect policymaking, especially about how political institutions affect the stability (or resoluteness) and adaptability (or decisiveness) of policy.

What does protest means in industrial societies? To answer this question, David Meyer and Sidney Tarrow bring together political scientists and sociologists from Europe and the United States to build on comparative insights. The 17 contributors include some of the most prominent voices in the study of contentious politics as well as a few new ones. Some chapters are organized around case studies (Klandermans, Roefs, and Olivier on the African National Congress; Rucht on protest in Germany; and McCarthy and McPhail on protest in the United States), while others compare across cases (Crozat on Western democracies; Della Porta, Fillieule, and Reiter on policing in France and Italy; Kubik on Central Europe; Hipsher on Latin America). The editors' introduction and the final two chapters (Katzenstein on feminist movements; Keck and Sikkink on transnational advocacy networks) advance cross-regional comparisons.

In The Courts of International Trade: Judicial Specialization, Expertise, and Bureaucratic Policymaking, Isaac Unah has ventured into territory that has remained largely uncharted by scholars of judicial politics. With the prominent exception of Lawrence Baum's work on specialized courts, few researchers in political science have chosen to explore courts that fall outside the federal judiciary's core hierarchy. Yet as Unah points out, these specialized courts, including the U.S. Tax Court, Claims Court, Court of International Trade, Bankruptcy Courts, and the Federal Circuit, perform critical functions that have the potential to affect business interests and shape bureaucratic performance in highly complex regulatory and economic areas. In this book, and in his previous published research, Unah has initiated an important expedition into unfamiliar but promising terrain.

This book is the result of a five-year research project that had as its goal the reform of the committee system in the Israeli Knesset. It had the full support of the leadership and members of that legislative body, and was conducted under the sponsorship of an important Israeli think tank, the Israel Democracy Institute. In undertaking this investigation, Reuvan Y. Hazan quickly discovered an additional reason for devoting so much time to this subject—the challenge of addressing “a flagrant deficiency in the political science literature” (p. 2), the dearth of comparative literature on parliamentary reform of committees.

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).

Given the Right's historic record of undermining democracy in Latin America, Kevin Middlebrook organized a conference in 1996 to examine its adjustment to the democratic rules of the posttransitions, post-Cold War era. This work began in that conference and is part of the editor's larger research program.

For the field of Russian comparative politics, the collapse of Soviet communism abruptly shifted attention from commissars and commanders to businessmen and bankers. Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly evident that a small cohort of newly rich financiers was influencing the course of Russia's transition. Yet it was not always clear in what ways and to what extent these upstart tycoons were acting as political players. With this book, the field at last has an authoritative, systematic rendering of the banking sector. Juliet Johnson chronicles the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia's big bankers during the postcommunist regime's formative decade.

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.

At the end of the Clinton era, it is appropriate for political scientists to undertake analyses of this two-term president's effect on any number of political and public policy phenomena. Clinton's most obvious talent showed itself in the electoral arena, where (even in a television era) he formed deeply personal relationships with voters, and many of these analyses rightfully focus on the foundations of Clinton's public support. Continuing this line of research, Hanes Walton examines a potential explanation for Clinton's relative strength in one region of the country—the turf on which his political career began—through an in-depth analysis of Clinton's electoral base across time in Arkansas and the South. The book examines a well-justified question, about the ongoing vitality of a “native son” phenomenon but numerous problems with the method by which Walton attempts to answer that question weaken this work. Numerous factual errors and muddled writing make it even more problematic.