Democratic Processes and Financial Markets: Pricing Politics. By William Bernhard and David Leblang. New York: Cambridge University Press 2006. 260p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99.

Imagine contemporary political economy as the electromagnetic spectrum. At one end are very long-run processes, such as the emergence of the political institutions that generate divergence between rich and poor countries in the world economy. At the other end are short-run phenomena, such as the movements in financial markets that we ponder while reading the stock pages with our morning coffee. For the last 10 years, William Bernhard and David Leblang have been exploring this latter end of the spectrum with clarity and rigor, and between them have pretty much defined the standards for the field.