The essays in this edited volume are the product of a seminar and conference at Georgetown University. In different ways, each contribution addresses the complex nature of the relationship between democracy and trust and helps to define the issues and questions involved in this relationship. The contributors address the topic from a variety of perspectives, some primarily theoretical and others combining theory and statistical analysis. As editor and contributing author, Mark Warren provides an effective framework for the diverse set of contributions that comprise the volume and develops a typology of theories of trust and democracy.

Regina Lawrence makes a major contribution to the criminal justice policy literature in her book, The Politics ofForce: Media and the Construction of Police Brutality. She helps observers of the criminal justice system understand one of the reasons the crime control model is the dominant one in the United States. To do this she studies two major police departments, New York and Los Angeles, and the reporting of police use of force incidents in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, respectively. Generally, the viewpoint of the police is presented in the newspaper accounts of the incidents. The police explanation involves blaming the individual wrongdoer without any serious discussion of systemic problems in the operation of the police department. In other words, the police view reinforces the crime control model, with its stress on the rapid and efficient removal of wrongdoers from the streets of this country. Thus Lawrence helps the reader understand why the views of police critics do not receive the same level of coverage as does the official view presented to the press by the police bureaucracy. In her concern with the definition of public problems, she contributes to a theory of issue construction. The significance of her findings is reinforced by her data sources: two major American newspapers including the New York Times, which is read by political elites throughout the United States. The data in the book are based on a content analysis of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times from 1984 to 1995. Also, an extensive analysis of the Rodney King case is presented. The information about the King case was garnered from a variety of newspapers and magazines. In addition, Lawrence gathered information for her study by interviewing reporters and police experts in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities.

Political scientists have been fascinated with the role of the Federal Reserve in making monetary policy. It has long been recognized that the Fed has a tremendous amount of power for a regulatory agency that has so much independence from political bodies. Students of comparative monetary institutions have marveled at the contrast of United States policy to that of the rest of the world, with the exception of Germany's Bundesbank. Yet political scientists and economists continue to try to identify how politics shapes American monetary policy. Irwin Morris's book offers a major corrective to some of the flaws of earlier efforts.

We live in a tabloid era defined by The National Enquirer and The Star. How has it affected popular confidence in the criminal justice system? Richard L. Fox and Robert W. Van Sickel's study examines the mass media's tabloid news coverage of high-profile criminal cases that involve violence and race, gender, and social class issues. This news coverage, they argue, sacrifices the media's educational function, misinforms the public about the operation of the criminal justice system, and contributes to the public's lack of faith in criminal justice.

Although It Didn't Happen Here addresses a rather familiar question—Why is there no socialism in the United States?—this is an exciting book. Its central chapters discuss the major explanations for American “exceptionalism” that have been proposed over the past century—namely, the distinctive character of U.S. political institutions, the ethnic heterogeneity of the nation's population, the divisions between labor unions and the socialist party, the sectarianism of American socialists, the repression that radicals encountered, etc. Political scientists will find the topics of many of these chapters familiar too.

A growing chorus of academics, journalists, and politicos alike bemoans the state of American democracy. The symptoms are well known. Public trust in government has declined over time, the stock of social capital has shrunk, and turnout remains low. Some observers even argue that politicians now are less responsive to public opinion on various issues. Perhaps understandably, there is increasing pressure for reform of the electoral process, including campaign finance, the conduct of campaigns, media coverage of campaigns, and election rules themselves. In By Popular Demand, John Gastil joins the call for reform, but in an original and provocative way.

Like other volumes in the series Issues in Political Theory, which Weale edits with Peter Jones, this book combines an overview of the topic suitable for advanced undergraduates and above with an original argument reflecting the author's distinctive perspective that is likely to stimulate fellow specialists. The combination is an attractive one, which, when it works—as it does in this case—ensures that we do not get the sort of deadly dull textbook that merely rehashes other people's ideas. There are two novel features of Weale's argument. The first is his justification of democracy in terms of its capacity to enable members of society to advance their common interests as political equals in a situation of human fallibility. The second is his attempt to delineate the form of democracy, including the type of representation and decision rule, most likely to promote this purpose. I take each in turn.

In this pathbreaking book, J. Eric Oliver proposes to answer an ambitious and important question: Has suburbanization brought about a decline of civic engagement in America? This question is, obviously, immensely important because more than half of all Americans live in suburbs. Whatever they think and how they vote and however much they participate in the civic life of their communities has enormous consequences, not only within the suburbs but also for the nation as a whole. The question is also consequential in light of the national debate that seems to have been provoked by the recent work on social capital. As Oliver notes, Robert Putnam has blamed suburbanization for part of the alleged loss in social capital in America. The general claim that suburbs have killed community and civic engagement is hardly new, and it has recently been amplified by (among others) advocates of the new urbanism. Oliver boldly states that “such claims are without any empirical basis” (p. 2), and he takes it as his task to supply the missing evidence that might answer the question. In doing so, he has produced a remarkable book, literally the first one ever published to present definitive evidence on the crucial issue of the impact of the suburbs on American democracy.

Engaging her contemporaries in debates over democratic ideals and processes, Iris M. Young offers a collection of seven essays that mitigate arguments on either side of those debates (participation vs. representation, localism vs. state, segregation vs. integration, identity vs. difference) by applying the critical ideal of inclusion. She argues that the normative legitimacy of democratic decisions rests upon the extent to which those affected by decisions are included in or have the opportunity to enter the decision making process. One might think that inclusion solves only one problem, the problem of exclusion, for democracy. However, Young extends the ideal of inclusion across manifold debates in democratic theory and speaks broadly to the less than ideal conditions under which we now practice democracy.

That environmental problems such as groundwater contamination, global warming, and loss of biodiversity pose mounting political challenges is now widely admitted. The meager progress in reversing these trends calls into question the adequacy of policy instruments conventionally used to address them. Gillroy maintains that the environmental policy failure stems from its grounding in economic reasoning. An alternative paradigm of Kantian inspiration is his proposed remedy.

The principles of state-based representation in the Senate and “one person, one vote” reside comfortably, yet incongruously in the American political psyche. Few of us have lectured on the Senate without raising this point. We carry on about Wyoming and California and their equal number of Senators. Perhaps our lectures extend to discussion of policy issues: Would Clarence Thomas have been confirmed if the Senate were apportioned based on population? and so on. But seldom does the discussion go much further. And, strikingly, this has been true even in the academy. We have 1,001 ways to measure committee preferences, but we know relatively little about the effects of state-based representation in the Senate. Lee and Oppenheimer's book changes this state of affairs and offers an excellent account of the importance of state-based representation for the Senate and beyond.

Trained in both law and political science, Julie Novkov has made a major contribution to an understanding of the transitions from the Progressive Era to the New Deal that will be especially important for new institutionalist scholars of the Supreme Court, for students of American political development, and for scholars of gender and politics, women's history, and labor history. It also instructs those activists both inside and outside the legal community who turn to the courts.

Leslie Alm presents what may be the best study yet produced on the acid rain policy debate, at least with regard to its scientific underpinnings. The book describes the evolution of the current U.S.-Canadian acid rain policy agreement and focuses on the role of scientists in the formulation and implementation of acid rain policy. Alm found that most natural scientists believe they have little influence on the policy process. He suggests they are not trained to understand policymakers, and policymakers are not trained to understand science. Both have a narrow focus that causes them to perceive selectively what the other is saying. As does Lynton K. Caldwell (Between Two Worlds: Science, the Environmental Movement, and Policy Choice, 1990), Alm informs us that scientists and policymakers operate in two totally different worlds using two different languages and two different time scales; this complicates the policy process.

It used to be an axiom in political science that American parties were weak. Now we are not so sure. During the 1980s and 1990s, the profession produced a great deal of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that U.S. political parties were “resurgent.” J. P. Monroe's book, The Political Party Matrix: The Persistence of Organization, provides an interesting twist on the new literature. It argues that party change is the result not so much of strengthening but of adaptation.

As the United States begins fighting a war devoted not to the overthrow or liberation of a particular government but, rather, as Mr. Bush put it, to rid the world of “evildoers,” it is easy to forget that our state is also busy at home killing people in the service of a similar oversimplified moralism. Austin Sarat's most recent book is, then, an important reminder. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 the country's appetite for it has steadily increased: More than 3,600 people now sit on death row, and their numbers continue to swell. While there have been some welcome signs of a slackening in the nation's tolerance for the killing of the mentally retarded and the innocent, the Rehnquist court has been streamlining the appeal process in an attempt, in the Chief Justice's words, to “get on with it.” Sarat rightly protests against the ensuing compromises of the rights of those caught up in the system, a disproportionate number of whom are, as everyone knows, poor and black. He argues that routine killing by the state is not just illiberal in its corrosive effect upon the Bill of Rights but in conflict with the institutions and spirit of our democracy. Where democracy calls for a willingness to seek reconciliation and the improvement of institutions through dialogue, and hence a willingness to admit that one's own perspective is limited and one's own judgment fallible, capital punishment requires that we assume the mantle of infallibility, and it is sustained by a spirit of rage that it in turn nurtures. One of the strongest features of Sarat's book is its insistence that none of this is accidental: “State killing…is part of a strategy of governance that makes us fearful and dependent on the illusion of state protection, that divides rather than unites, that promises simple solutions to complex problems” (p. 247). It is easier and less anxiety-producing to tell ourselves familiar comic book stories about the battle of good and evil than to get down to “the difficult, often frustrating work of understanding what in our society breeds such heinous acts of violence” (p. 14). And if we believe the stories we tell, it is hard to imagine living without the protection of a powerful and threatening state that can match the violent forces arrayed against us. For those who profit politically or financially from the present forms of that society, that is all to the better. Protego ergo obligo.

“There remains,” writes Michael T. Hayes in his provocative new book, “a pressing need to educate the public—specialists and nonspecialists alike—on what politics can accomplish, and at what speed” (p. 189). To this end, Hayes challenges what Thomas Sowell (A Conflict of Visions, 1987) calls the tenets of “articulated rationality” (i.e., rational-comprehensive ideals) in the policy process. He vigorously asserts that the benefits of incrementalism (viz., its focus on “partisan mutual adjustment,” its understanding of “the importance of checks on the arbitrary abuse of power,” and “its ability to draw on the dispersion of knowledge throughout the political system” [p. 8]) exceed its costs (e.g., delay and incoherent policy outcomes). Moreover, on balance, “partisan mutual adjustment produces better [emphasis added] policy outcomes than any attempt at rational-comprehensive analysis” (p. 8).

The public discourse on the purpose of education is dominated by functionalist or human capital theory, which argues that the primary purpose of schools is to impart to citizens skills that will be needed to compete and win in the U.S. marketplace and the global economy. This edited volume attempts to correct this imbalance by emphasizing civics education and political socialization as important functions of schools.

The new monographs by R. Allen Hays and Allen F. Zundel are welcome additions to our effort to understand the processes by which Americans make social welfare policy. Hays's work looks at the set of interest groups that testified before Congress on poverty policy during the 28-year period from 1970 to 1997, a period characterized by both incremental change and major upheaval in poverty policymaking. Zundel's work examines the rhetorical frames that have driven major social welfare reform efforts over the past century and a half.

For decades the U.S. courts of appeals were afflicted with the proverbial middle child syndrome. They were given less than deserved attention by legal scholars and political scientists, and their decisions commanded less media and popular attention than rulings by the Supreme Court and even decisions of federal district courts. To many observers, the appeals courts were relatively invisible. Circuit courts are convalescing from this affliction because increasingly political scientists are turning their analytical attention to these thirteen important stations of judicial power in American society.

The conceptual—and legal—division between a woman and a fetus is most recently rooted in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which established the trimester framework designed to balance a woman's right to privacy with the state's interest in protecting potential life. Prior to Roe, a woman and her fetus were legally viewed as having identical interests because of their biological tie. The trimester framework, however, established a precedent for viewing the maternal-fetal relationship as an adversarial one, where a woman and her fetus have conflicting interests. Indeed, as states demonstrate their willingness to protect fetal health—via restrictions on access to abortion—the fetus is increasingly being viewed as a separate entity that is entitled to protection and recognition as a person. The questions of when and under what conditions a fetus is a person have policy implications beyond the scope of the abortion debate.