The Politics of Child Support in America. By Jocelyn Elise Crowley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 217p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

Jocelyn Crowley argues that child support policy is an example of innovation through entrepreneurial activity over time. Relying on secondary and original sources, she identifies four different sets of entrepreneurs—social workers, conservatives, women legislators/women's groups, and fathers' rights groups. Crowley claims that over the long term, policies continuously evolve and actors enter, exit, and reenter the political arena. Policy entrepreneurs are the central actors who create policy change. She defines policy entrepreneurs as people who are alert to new opportunities, persist in advocating their ideas, and employ rhetorical ingenuity to frame their ideas in novel ways (p. 8). Groups, as well as individuals, have these entrepreneurial characteristics. Changes in child support policy, in the author's view, can be explained by changes in the domination of the political arena of different entrepreneurial groups.