Authorizing Policy. By Thad Hall. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004. 147p. $41.95.

In the complex and multilayered world of congressional budgeting, the authorization process attracts less attention than dramatic battles over taxes and deficits or spending bills. The literature on public policymaking rarely puts much emphasis on how and when Congress authorizes programs. Thad Hall's book fills an important gap in these literatures with his insightful analysis of the strategic use of short-term authorizations. He looks at many dimensions of authorizations, including their ability to induce stability by enforcing policy agreements, their relationship to congressional institutions and instrumental behavior by members, and their effect on the policy environment, policy implementation, and congressional oversight.

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. By Margaret Kohn. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p. $85.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

In her first book, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (2003), Margaret Kohn analyzed the spatiality of early working-class activism in Italy and developed a sophisticated argument about the conditions for democratic empowerment. In this book, she shifts her attention to the United States. Aside from one chapter on the Wobblies, the focus is on the present. In both books, her emphasis is on the way in which the space for political engagement—“public space”—is constructed, sustained, controlled, or foreclosed. Her overarching theme is that theorists of democracy have paid far too little attention to the spatial conditions for democratic interaction. As she attempts to show in the present book, the privatization of public space—that is, the transformation of once-open downtowns into privately governed business improvement districts, the creation of privately governed gated communities in the suburbs and elsewhere, and the colonization of once-public space by private businesses—tends to insulate people from direct, physical encounters with people who are “different” or who may be attempting to persuade them to think otherwise about political issues. The trend toward privatization is particularly pronounced in the United States, and Kohn's concern here is to show us why we should be concerned about it, as democrats.

A Seat of Popular Leadership: The Presidency, Political Parties, and Democratic Government. By Michael J. Korzi. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. 292p. $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Through an examination of the political biographies and annual messages of selected presidents, Michael Korzi provides a rich description of the rise and decline of party government in the nineteenth century. He persuasively argues that nineteenth-century parties were not mere spoils machines but parties of principles and policies. Moreover, he claims that the model of nineteenth-century party presidents presents an attractive alternative to the detached statesmanship championed by the Founders, as well as the unrestrained popular leadership practiced by twentieth-century presidents.

The Making of Environmental Law. By Richard J. Lazarus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 312p. $35.00.

Richard Lazarus brings rich experience to this book. In the 1980s, he served as a litigator in the Environment and Natural Resources Division, and as an assistant to the solicitor general, in the Department of Justice. He has represented environmental groups and local, state, and federal governments in numerous cases before the Supreme Court. Given this extensive legal background, one might expect the book to be a dense treatise on environmental law. Yet it is written for a much broader audience, with an engaging narrative style that is accessible for those not trained as lawyers. It is also interdisciplinary, covering everything from ecological theory in the opening chapters to the historical, economic, and political contexts of environmental law in the United States. While this interdisciplinary effort is admirable, the strength of the book clearly lies in the author's legal interpretations. Political scientists will be less impressed with his discussion of topics like public opinion and interest group behavior. Yet what matters more than relatively minor shortcomings with respect to any one discipline is that Lazarus has produced an engaging and articulate book that strives to reach a broad audience beyond law schools. For this reason, The Making of Environmental Law would make a wonderful addition to upper-division and masters level environmental policy courses. It is not sufficiently theoretical for most doctoral seminars, but it certainly deserves a central location on the shelves of environmental policy scholars.

Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin. By Lawrence M. Mead. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 368p. $35.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

One of the most challenging aspects of welfare reform was that it made policy evaluation more difficult, especially after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 allowed states to shift from operating federal public assistance programs (or variants under waiver authority) to implementing programs of their own design. Analysts accustomed to studying a relatively stable set of nationally comparable social programs had to begin asking new, and sometimes startlingly basic, questions about the kinds of benefits that state and local governments were providing, to whom they were providing them, and on what basis. As a result, research on U.S. poverty and welfare reliance suffered a major setback at precisely the time when the need to track policy outcomes became especially critical.

Self-Policing in Politics: The Political Economy of Reputational Controls on Politicians. By Glenn R. Parker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 192p. $35.00.

With his latest book, Glenn Parker continues to take us along on his personal odyssey exploring the motivations of political officials and their consequences for our institutions and the quality of representation found in the American political system. Following his work that assumes legislators seek to maximize discretion and that explores how they structure their institutions to achieve that goal (Institutional Change, Discretion, and the Making of the Modern Congress, 1992) and his analysis of Congress in a rent-seeking environment (Congress and the Rent-Seeking Society, 1996), Parker, in this work, explores his concern for constraining the behavior of members of Congress who are increasingly “seeking material gain” (p. 12).

Saving Open Space: The Politics of Local Preservation in California. By Daniel Press. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 197p. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book poses two questions: “Why do some communities preserve more open space than others? More specifically, what are the conditions for creating innovative, effective land preservation institutions at the local level?” (p. 1). Daniel Press systematically answers these questions with respect to a single state, California, arguing that its experience offers lessons for all states, inasmuch as “California's experience with rapid growth and land preservation resembles that of the rest of the nation” (p. 50).

Democrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women's Place. By Kira Sanbonmatsu. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 328 pages. $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

In her book, Kira Sanbonmatsu provides a compelling and evenhanded analysis of how political parties have come to embrace issues of gender. She provides a penetrating longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of this response of political parties against a backdrop of the women's movement. With elections since 1992 focusing on women as voters and candidates, and with a growth of interest in parties due to their apparent polarization on issues and their newfound ways around campaign finances laws, her timely study contributes to a broader understanding of party realignment and adds to recent scholarship (e.g., see Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting, 1997).

Deserving and Entitled: Social Constructions and Public Policy. Edited by Anne L. Schneider and Helen M. Ingram. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 416p. $89.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram have assembled 11 essays by scholars who examine how Americans' understandings of social groups shape both the process and substantive outcomes of policymaking. Explaining how such meanings are made and what they imply proves to be a challenge for the contributors to this edited volume. Because the central concepts here are rather amorphous—group entitlement and deservingness—much room remains for argument about how much of either quality the target groups enjoy. The stated purpose of the book, “to explain, examine, and criticize the social construction of deservedness and entitlement in public policy,” is useful and ambitious (p. 2). Though rich in descriptive content on topics such as Revolutionary War pensions, policies toward Japanese-Americans, housing discrimination law, welfare, and microenterprise development, most of the essays raise many more questions than they answer regarding how socially constructed meanings come to be, how they matter for policy development, and the conditions under which such understandings significantly matter. Examining how public policies enhance or hinder the development of full citizenship is the central question running through these thought-provoking chapters.

Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity. By Mary E. Stuckey. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 404p. $35.00.

This is a powerful, ambitious book on the connection between American presidents and American identity. Mary Stuckey argues that through their rhetoric, American presidents reduce an often contradictory and always complex set of national identities into a single overarching one. Presidents present this idealized universal in attempts to unify and preserve existing political structures and beliefs and to minimize differences in the national debate. They offer this national identity while also attempting to maintain their political coalitions and address certain pressing policy problems.

Interstate Economic Relations. By Joseph F. Zimmerman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 308p. $60.00.

Scholars of American federalism have focused much more attention on relations between federal and state governments than they have on those among states. Joseph F. Zimmerman is the exception. Although this book is replete with an impressive number of citations, it is Zimmerman himself who has almost single-handedly rectified this state of affairs. His earlier publications on national–state relations, including federal preemption, federal mandates, and federal–state commissions, were the precursors to two comprehensive examinations of interstate relations. In Interstate Relations: The Neglected Dimension of Federalism (1996), Zimmerman laid out basic premises of interstate relations within the American federal system. In Interstate Economic Relations, he expands considerably those premises, illustrates them with case studies of economic competition and cooperation among the states, and presents impressive evidence of the critical role of the U.S. Supreme Court as parameter-setting referee.

The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence. Edited by Beverley Baines and Ruth Rubio-Marin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 356p. $75.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Comparative law remains a small and relatively isolated area of inquiry. There are two barriers to development of the field. First, with the exception of taxation law and, possibly, divorce, comparative analysis of law is of little use to practicing lawyers. Second, as I discovered in a project on comparative rape law, it is difficult to gain access to the primary data sources, especially outside North America and Western Europe. In addition, there are few opportunities for interdisciplinary study—despite the attention of the Law and Society Association. Those who are not legal scholars need guides to the technical aspects of legal research to make the work of specialists more accessible.

Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe. By Giovanni Capoccia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 352p. $49.95.

This study elaborates a central aspect of Juan Linz's (1978) Crisis, Breakdown, and Re-equilibration: a focus on choices made by democratic incumbents facing extremist challengers aiming to install nondemocratic rule. To put it in Linzian terms, Giovanni Capoccia seeks to develop Linz's “mentality” on that subject into a more systematic statement. Linz claimed that these leaders' choices are crucial, and he illustrated with examples; Capoccia rightly proposes that such a claim deserves monographic treatment in its own right. His effort is illuminating on several counts but falls short of full persuasiveness on others.

Popular Political Support in Urban China. By Jie Chen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 246p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

What is the matter with Beijing? China's capital is overcrowded and heavily polluted. Beijing's elderly face shrinking government pensions and health-care services. Its middle aged try to reinvent themselves out of unemployment. Its youth strive for jobs, with tens of millions of upwardly mobile rural Chinese flocking to the cities, and at the same time try to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of millions of other future middle-class urbanites struggling to enter the upper end of the global economy. Despite protests in city and countryside, the Chinese government continues to privatize and liberalize its economy, and the Chinese Communist Party still punishes all forms of organized political opposition.

Contesting the Iron Fist: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile. By Claudio A. Fuentes. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p. $75.00.

Police violence has become an all too common reality in Latin America. Most scholars have chalked up the problem to authoritarian legacies, ones inherited from colonialism, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century caudillo's or more recently from military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these studies fail to explain why police violence can vary so widely from country to country or from one time period to another, nor can they account for genuine reform efforts. Fortunately, Claudio Fuentes's book departs from these formulas and offers a more plausible theory of police abuse in Latin America.

Domestic Budgets in a United Europe: Fiscal Governance from the End of Bretton Woods to EMU. By Mark Hallerberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 258p. $39.95.

Why did nearly all European Union member states in the late 1990s succeed in reducing their budget deficits below the necessary 3% threshold in time to join the monetary union, after years of varied success at achieving fiscal discipline? Do the explicit criteria set out by the Treaty of Maastricht and the prospect of participating in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) fully explain the fiscal convergence seen in Europe prior to and immediately following monetary union? These are the questions that concern Mark Hallerberg's book. Rather than crediting the incentive of joining the euro zone, Hallerberg focuses on the domestic sources of fiscal reform since 1973. He argues that the Maastricht criteria were important in certain countries, especially in southern Europe. But to understand why virtually all states achieved a sufficiently low budget deficit to participate in monetary union, one must examine the competitiveness of the party system, the functioning of the electoral system, and the ideological coherence of the governing coalitions in individual countries. Domestic political factors offer a more nuanced, and ultimately more convincing, account of fiscal policy in Europe at the end of the twentieth century.

Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization. Edited by Robert W. Hefner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 408p. $19.95.

The line between popular culture and scholarship has been obscured by the large volume of books and articles dealing with Islam that came out in the United States after September 11. One can see the features of an Islam Industry dominating production (popular, commercial, media, and sometimes academic) on—or against—Islam. The matter is quite important as this has become an issue that transcends mere intellectual pursuits and deals with policy matters and, most importantly, with wars. Pundits now casually speak with glee about a war “within Islam” as if to portray U.S. official roles as marginal or secondary. Amid the plethora of books on Islam, one welcomes with great enthusiasm a serious and sober look at Islam in the political and social realms worldwide. Remaking Muslim Politics was based on an academic conference, and the papers were later collected in a book form.

Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism. By Yoshiko M. Herrera. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 318p. $75.00.

In her book Yoshiko Herrera crafts an impressive theoretical argument by first noting and then rectifying an important intellectual inconsistency in contemporary studies of nationalism. While these studies typically view identities as multiple and constructed, they nevertheless tend to treat economic interests as unproblematic and objective. Herrera challenges this assumption by arguing that economic understandings are constructed as well, and that these constructed views of economic interests will affect the relative propensity of substate regions to press for greater autonomy or secession. As she succinctly puts it, “The central argument of this book is that variation in regional activism is explained not by differences in structural economic conditions but by differences in understandings of the economy, which, in particular institutional contexts, resulted in differences in the imagination of economic interests” (p. 11).

Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity. By Paul J. Kubicek. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 256p. $29.95.

What happened to organized labor when capitalism came to postcommunist Europe? Paul Kubicek provides a convincing answer to this question, based on case studies of Poland, Russia, Hungary, and Ukraine. He confirms the core story of labor weakness laid out in Stephen Crowley and David Ost, eds., Workers After Workers' States (2001). Kubicek draws on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources and dozens of interviews with union officials, mostly in 2001–2.

The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela. Edited by Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 368p. $49.95.

The replacement of a “stable” democracy with an elected self-proclaimed “revolutionary” government—especially in a major petroleum-exporting country—demands the attention of comparative politics. Thus, this volume is a welcome addition to the rather thin body of scholarship on Venezuela. Comprised of essays by several leading students of Venezuelan politics, it locates the preconditions for Hugo Chavez's rise in the vulnerabilities of the previous regime. Some chapters, including the conclusion, also attempt to explain the nature of the new government under Chavez. However, given the origins of the book in conference papers from 2000, the latter task is quite underdeveloped. A fuller analysis of the nature and structure of the Chavez government, now into the final year of its first full constitutional term, would have made the book all the more valuable. Nonetheless, its question about democracy's “unraveling” is of great importance.