Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin America. By Alberto Díaz-Cayeros. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 302p. $80.00.

Comparative federalism is a vibrant area of research, at the crossroads of various methodological and disciplinary approaches, and it has contributed to and enriched broader strands of scholarship in comparative politics and institutional analysis. Alberto Díaz-Cayeros has been one of the leading new voices in this area. Federalism, Fiscal Authority, and Centralization in Latin America is a useful signpost in this agenda. The book explores the politics of fiscal authority, focusing on the centralization of taxation in Latin America during the twentieth century. It develops a theoretical framework and applies it to an analytic narrative of the path of Mexico. It also provides a comparison with the other Latin American federations, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. The book effectively blends quantitative and qualitative empirical exploration with formal modeling, touching important chords of broader debates in political science, including issues of state building, institutional origin and institutional change, the structure of interest representation, and political agency.