The multiracial extravaganza staged at the 2000 Republican convention reminds us of the centrality of race in our national politics. In a work that effectively challenges cher- ished notions of how the political system functions, Paul Frymer argues that through most of U.S. history the major parties have lacked incentives to promote the interests of African Americans.

The editors of this timely volume announce at the outset that their aim is to provide a forum for recent scholarship that reacts critically to the previous generation of behavioralists who, since the 1950s, have analyzed the U.S. Supreme Court as little more than an aggregate of the relatively stable and identifiable policy preferences held by individual justices. Specifically, these essays pose a collective "response by a succeeding generation of Supreme Court scholars who are trained in political behavioralism but who have rediscovered the value and importance of understanding institutional contexts" (p. 12).

Major league baseball, unlike other professional sports in the United States, has been exempt from antitrust laws for nearly a century. The reason lies with early state and federal court decisions, of which the most frequently cited is the Supreme Court's Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League opinion, authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1922. Baseball's legal status has been the subject of numerous law review articles and commentaries, historical narratives, and scholarly analyses. Nevertheless, Jerold Duquette claims that there has been no integrated and comprehensive examination of "baseball's unregulated monopoly."

After a promising start by Martin Landau more than 30 years ago, and advances by a small coterie of mostly Berkeley and Stanford political scientists and organization theorists, the study of organizational reliability has largely been orphaned by American political science. One reason such an important area of research has been given short shrift is that many political scientists do not think of reliability as a subject based in politics. It has been deemed more worthy of the attention of other disciplines, especially engineering and operations research. Another reason is that we have become even more obsessed with transactional efficiencies than was the case when Landau issued his warnings in 1969. Larry Heimann presents a nuanced study on the problem of reliability that incorporates politics, organization, and technology and offers a series of convincing arguments about some reliability paradoxes in policymaking. His book centers on the connec- tion between bureaucratic structure, reliable decision mak- ing, and the incentives public agencies have for responding to risk in one way or another.

In an era when campaign finance reform is widely discussed by politicians, political scientists, and journalists, Money Matters provides a timely and thoughtful analysis of several reform proposals. The central focus is on the effect that spending limits, matching funds, full public funding, and partial public funding with spending limits would have on electoral competition, voter turnout, and voter involvement in elections to the House of Representatives.

Many political scientists like institutions, in particular exog- enous institutions, which guide and constrain actions and allow scholars to concentrate more narrowly on behaviors within well-defined settings. For the interest groups subfield, institutions tend to be more mercurial than those in other areas of American politics. For instance, fundamental aspects of Congress may be institutionalized, but groups and lobby- ists come and go. The environment of interests is ever changing. Characterizing the interactions between legislators and lobbyists is made more difficult because of the lack of clear institutional structures that guide or constrain behav- iors. The iron triangle concept was powerful and meaningful because it provided at the least a loose framework for the analysis of legislator-lobbyist interactions. Kevin Hula's new book follows the reasoning of Hugh Heclo and William Browne, who argue that the iron triangle concept is outdated and inappropriate. That convenient metaphor suggested an informal institutional structure that is simply no longer appropriate. Without the iron triangle, what can fill the void?

Desmond King offers a richly researched, skillfully written account of the development of a race-based U.S. immigration policy during the 1920s. The shift to a "national origins" immigration policy is linked to domestic racial and ethnic politics and especially to racial segregation. Moreover, King contends that a grasp of the immigration debates and policies of the 1920s is instrumental to understanding contemporary racial and ethnic politics, including the controversies sur- rounding multiculturalism.

David Lake provides a theoretical framework for under- standing the security choices made by the United States in the twentieth century. He grounds his work in the metaphor that polities may be understood as firms producing security. The fundamental choices before states are unilateralism and cooperation. The former is equated with production within a single firm, and the latter can take several forms. Principal among these are alliances, in which polities act as if they were separate and independent firms entering into joint produc- tion agreements, and empire, which is similar to the integra- tion that takes place in the modern multidivisional corpora- tion. Alliances and empires form the end points of a continuum of security relationships. Alliances are at the anarchy end, as each polity retains full decision authority.

The American political system has many features that set it apart from other governments of the world, but not all are equally apparent. One distinctive aspect is the length and importance of the transition period from one presidential administration to another. In most countries the passage of power occurs almost as soon as the election results are known (consider, e.g., the rapid assumption of power by President Kostunica after Slobodan Milosevic admitted defeat in the September 2000 Yugoslav election), but in the United States roughly ten weeks elapse between the election and inaugu- ration. The American approach, as Charles Jones puts it in this outstanding book, is to transfer power at a "leisurely pace."

During the last quarter of the twentieth century there was an explosion in the use of institutional corrections unparalleled in the annals of American penology. The numbers tell the story well: Just before the new millennium almost 1.3 million adults were confined in state and federal correctional facili- ties, which represents a tripling of the population in just under 20 years. One consequence of such a policy, and there are many, is that eventually a large proportion of these inmates will be released back into society. Their prospects do not look promising in terms of our current knowledge about recidivism rates, and we can expect a large and, most likely, increasing number of these individuals to rejoin the ranks of the incarcerated. The reasons for this policy failure are undoubtedly traceable to a number of forces, although one probably need not look beyond the prison walls as a place to start searching for answers.