No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2008
This issue of Perspectives contains reviews of a wide range of books across the conventional subfields. One theme that links many of the books under review, and thus the reviews themselves, is the theme of trust. In short, to what extent is effective and enduring political governance reliant on the development of forms of credibility, or “credible commitment,” among citizens and between citizens and political institutions? The problem of trust has been central to political inquiry at least as far back as Hobbes and arguably Aristotle, for whom civic “friendship” was an indispensable condition of politics. And it has recently assumed particular prominence in political science, as evidenced in the reviews below.