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.

The most challenging task in today's comparative politics is crafting a fruitful combination of a general theory of political behavior with a nontrivial and sufficiently rich portrayal of that behavior's social, cultural, and historical context. At the same time, a consensus is emerging that holism is out, individualism is in, and the discipline's intellectual effort should be primarily focused on the reconstruction of the rules (mechanisms) governing the strategizing behavior of individuals in various social and cultural contexts. Macro-historical-structural explanations are largely out of favor. Given this intellectual climate, the premium is placed on studies that employ rational choice/game theoretical framework and test its applicability and limitations in the study of non-Western political systems. Such tests of applicability inevitably involve a confrontation between slim and parsimonious game-theoretic models and detail-rich ethnographic or historical reconstructions. Sometimes such confrontations end up in fruitless, mutual acrimony; recently, however, they have led to many instances of cross-fertilization and productive revisions of both sides' analytical assumptions.

Filippo Sabetti has written an important book, not just for specialists in Italian politics, but also for those more generally interested in comparative politics. Poor government performance has often been associated with the Italian state, so much so that foreign scholars often used Italy as an ideal locale to probe the seminal causes of political pathology. Edward Banfield's (1958) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, for example, attributed poor political performance to the particular beliefs and attitudes of Italians, to an inadequate moral basis he identified as “amoral familism.” The village Banfield studied, Chiaromonte (which he called Montegrano), soon became a model for “backward societies” in the comparative literature and later was woven into game theoretic concerns, such as the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma. Banfield's “culturalist” approach was later refined in Robert Putnam's (1993) Making Democracy Work. Rather than condemning all Italy to pathological status, as Banfield's Montegrano writ large, Putnam compared the “unsuccessful” South with the civic-minded North, where a density of associations and an abundance of “social capital” not only made “democracy work,” but also contributed to economic prosperity. Putnam later extended this analysis of associability and social capital to the United States, most famously in his work on “bowling alone.”

Elections and Democratization in Ukraine represents a valuable contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of party systems development in postcommunist politics. Unlike many volumes that rely on largely anecdotal evidence and narrative, this book is extremely well organized and systematic. There is a clear theoretical structure, and systematic evidence is employed to test specific hypotheses. Using some of the classic works on the development of party systems and relations between parties and voters to provide a theoretical framework, the author derives a set of hypotheses about characteristics that might affect voter choices over time.

As David Pion-Berlin explains in his Introduction, this collection of essays seeks to link the field of Latin American civil-military studies to major theoretical approaches in mainstream political science. Accordingly, the contributors draw from the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches in an effort to break what the editor of this book views as a long-standing isolation of Latin Americanists in general, and the region's civil-military specialists in particular, “from the major intellectual traditions, currents, and debates in political science and in the field of comparative politics” (p. 16). Therefore, the stated purpose of this volume is to reexamine civil-military relations in Latin America, taking into account major contextual changes (the wave of democratization in the region, the transition to free market economies, the end of the Cold War) and the potential contribution of mainstream analytical perspectives to new insights into this important theme in Latin American politics.

One defining feature of a constitutional democracy is that the defeat of the governing party in a general election leads to a peaceful, orderly, and more or less routine change of government. Given the inherently combative nature of electoral politics and the potential for disruptive action by the losing side, this is no small achievement, and when it happens it is justly celebrated. Transitions in constitutional regimes, moreover, provide a unique if momentary window through which to view the mainsprings of political power. This volume is a study of the 1995 transition from New Democratic Party (NDP) to Progressive Conservative (PC) rule in the province of Ontario. It makes an important contribution to the sparse literature on transitions in Canada and in parliamentary regimes generally. For students of comparative government, it usefully complements recent work on presidential transitions in the United States, particularly Charles O. Jones, Passages to the Presidency: From Campaigning to Governing (1998).

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.

Eliz Sanasarian's book is a welcome addition to the growing number of books on Iran since the Islamic Republic replaced the monarchy in 1979. She deals with an important yet little-covered subject: how religious minorities fare under an Islamic government. Just as Sanasarian's first book, The Women's Rights Movement in Iran, broke new ground and added much to our knowledge about of the status of women under the monarchy and the first few years of the Islamic Republic, Religious Minorities in Iran also fills a gap in scholarship. Some books and articles have been published since the Islamic revolution on Iranian Jews and Bahais, but little has appeared on Iran's Zoroastrian and Armenian communities, and virtually nothing on Iran's Chaldeans and Assyrians. No one has treated all the religious minorities in one volume. (Sansarian is, of course, dealing with religious minorities, not ethnic communities such as the Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, Turks, and others.)

This nice, tight volume offers a novel approach to looking at the civil–military issues that have been a major focus of political science and Latin American studies over the past four decades. Using 10 short essays by predominantly Europe-based scholars (Frederick Nunn of the United States, Celso Castro of Brazil, and Francisco Rojas Arevana of Chile are the exceptions), this collection stretches the evaluative process of civilian–military interactions in the region. Not merely accepting the bureaucratic–authoritarian model of Guillermo O'Donnell or others, it uses a much broader measure of the relationships in society to evaluate the health of Latin America today. It is a short collection that would be an excellent challenge for new graduate students in the subfield of civil–military relations or Latin American politics.

The debate about the history and future of the welfare state is gradually expanding beyond the advanced industrial countries to encompass the middle-income developing countries and the formerly socialist economies of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This debate is particularly interesting in Asia. The newly industrializing countries in that region have had great success in increasing incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining an equitable distribution of income. At the same time, the countries in the region are highly “globalized”—a factor often associated with increased economic insecurity—and until the 1980s were for the most part ruled by labor-repressive authoritarian regimes. By traditional measures of effort, they also appear to have surprisingly shallow public commitment to social welfare.

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.

These books address the same issue, the democratization of Taiwan, but use diametrically opposed analytic frameworks. The results are individually unsatisfying but, paradoxically, complementary.

This illuminating account of child day-care policies and practice in Britain casts a dark shadow over equality in that country. Through the exploration of the simple question of why the public provision of child care has been so meager in Britain, Vicky Randall presents a compelling account not just of policy failure but of a general disinterest in child care as an equal opportunity issue. For her, there are intrinsic flaws in British society that have hindered the provision and funding of public child care in that country. The reason for this systemic inequality is to be found, principally, in the British brand of liberalism, combined with the country's institutional structures, both of which have operated from the premise that child care is a private concern.

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?

Students of social movements have long struggled to explain why insurgencies occur where and when they do. In this excellent study, Heather Williams examines two contemporary Mexican movements—one rural, one urban—as a means to explain why unrest develops, when movements form, and what movement activists are likely to do once they manage to construct an organization and articulate a set of collective demands. Expanding on the work of Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and other scholars who have wrestled with these questions, Williams is concerned with the way in which Mexico's successive economic crises, and the implementation of neoliberal policies in response to these crises, influence the manner in which the dispossessed organize and press their demands on the state.

Ronald Chilcote is a leading radical political economist, and this book is a fine illustration of his well-earned reputation. It is a comprehensive survey of most of the major writers and themes that have dominated the literature on liberal and radical political economy, organized historically and by schools of thought around key concepts: class, state, imperialism, and transitions. The core of the book focuses on these four conceptual areas.

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.

The fate of Russia's economic and political reforms is the subject of this interpretative history of the last years of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin period, The book provides a useful, if controversial, introduction to the events of this crucial period in Russian political development, from 1990 to 1999. Special attention is given to the events surrounding important turning points in Russian history; there are particularly detailed treatments of the August 1991 coup, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin's forcible disbanding of the parliament in October 1993. In the end, though, the large number of events the authors seek to analyze is a liability because it tends to detract from and dilute the main argument.

Teresa Wright provides a well-researched in-depth comparative analysis of student movements in China and Taiwan. Although this is not the only work to look at these movements, this book is a useful addition to the literature because it (1) contains information about the political environment in China and Taiwan in the late 1980s, (2) presents thorough accounts of events from the beginning to the end of both movements, (3) provides valuable information about organizational decision making and conflicts within the student protest groups, and (4) puts forth several hypotheses about dissident behavior that can be applied to other cases. China's Democracy Movement of 1989 and Taiwan's Month of March Movement of 1990 are cases that cry out for comparison. Both movements were preceded by conflict regarding a change or shift of power in their governments, and students in both movements exhibited similar behavior. However, the Democracy Movement of 1989 was ended by the state with the use of violent repression, while the Month of March Movement concluded peacefully and successfully. Both of these cases share a variety of similarities with the exception of their outcomes; therefore Wright seizes the opportunity to review the genesis and effect of student behavior in 1989 and 1990.

Religion has played a prominent role in Israel's history. The country was founded in 1948 with a declaration of being a Jewish state, not only a state for the Jews. This definition has been the source of two thorny problems. The first involves the relations between state and religion, the second the relationship between two communities, namely, the secular majority and the religious minority. The two books under review tackle these problems in a fascinating manner. They complement each other by presenting different aspects of the intricate religious issue in Israel. They also contradict each other by offering conflicting conclusions based on historical and contemporary analysis.