Language Rights and Political Theory. Edited by Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 368p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Language rights and language policy are significant issues in contemporary politics and have become an important subject for political theorists today. Yet until now, there has been no major work or edited volume dealing with language rights from the standpoint of normative political theory. Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten have put together a volume of essays to remedy this situation. According to the editors of this valuable collection, linguistic diversity has emerged as a major source of controversy in a number of distinct political contexts. In their comprehensive introduction to the topic, and the volume, they identify these contexts as including at least five areas: Eastern Europe, regional languages/minority nationalisms, immigrant integration, European Union/transnational democracy, and indigenous languages/biodiversity. As political theorists in recent years have explored ideas of citizenship, nationhood, multiculturalism, and deliberative democracy, it has become increasingly evident, they say, that political theories often rest on presuppositions about people's language repertoires. It is important that these presuppositions, and their implications, be explored and subjected to critical scrutiny. The aim of this collection is to do precisely this. In the end, it is entirely successful in its ambitions. The chapters are of high quality and deal with issues that are important. Anyone presently interested in working on language rights in political theory should begin here.

School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics. By Melissa M. Deckman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 240p. $39.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Although it is almost conventional wisdom that the Christian Right was born in local political controversies, often over public education, scholars have usually focused on the movement's role in national electoral politics. Melissa Deckman restores some balance with an interesting study of Christian Right activity in school board politics. Although the book provides only a good start in that endeavor, it suggests many avenues for future research.

For Better or Worse: How Political Consultants Are Changing Elections in the United States. By David A. Dulio. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 289p. $71.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

This analysis addresses two important developments in American political campaigns: the increase in the presence of political consultants and their effect on campaigns. In pursuing this analysis, David Dulio focuses on the central questions of whether consultants are changing the nature of campaigns and whether their presence has displaced the role of political parties. The analysis draws heavily on a survey conducted in 1999 among 505 political consultants by American University staff.

Polls and Politics: The Dilemmas of Democracy. Edited by Michael A. Genovese and Matthew A. Streb. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 192p. $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Reading a book that germinated from conferences is a bit like eating at a recommended restaurant in an unfamiliar city. Tasting untried food [for thought] is heightened by the novelty of the locale. Chapters serve as courses; some are better than others, and in the end, one often is pleased by the experience, even if the parts of the experience were in need of refinement. Polls and Politics emanates from a 2002 Loyola Marymount University conference on the topic. The book unites leading scholars in the field, as they examine questions about the role of polls in American democracy, and it is entertaining, provocative, and at times flawed. The flaws, however, are not in a particular author's argument, but rather in what is omitted in the collected volume. It highlights the dilemmas associated with public opinion polling in the twenty-first century, but does little to aid the authors in seeking ways of measuring or mitigating those flaws.

Empowering the White House: Governance under Nixon, Ford, and Carter. By Karen M. Hult and Charles E. Walcott. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 264p. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This is the sequel to the authors' previous study, Governing the White House, which examined White House organization and process in the Hoover through Johnson administrations. Drawing on scores of White House documents from the presidential libraries, Karen Hult and Charles Walcott assess the development of the chief of staff and staff secretariat positions, as well as several other institutional components of the White House, such as the Office of Public Liaison, the White House Counsel's office, the Office of Communications, the Office of Congressional Relations, and the Office of Speechwriting and Research.

Democracy Defended. By Gerry Mackie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 483p. $85.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The main thesis in this book is that social choice theorists, and especially Bill Riker and his Rochester “school,” have cast a “long dark shadow over democratic politics” (the title of Chapter 1). Gerry Mackie then proceeds to dispel this dark shadow by an excessively argumentative interpretation of an impressive number of intellectual accomplishments in the study of social choice, public choice, and what is called in political science “formal theory.” His main attack is directed against the work of Riker, especially that author's work on disequilibrium in majority rule.

Neopluralism: The Evolution of Political Process Theory. By Andrew S. McFarland. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 208p. $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Pluralism and its advocates once dominated the study of American politics. And by staking out a strong positivist position on the fundamental issue of political power in their battle with elite theorists, pluralists also influenced the discipline of political science as a whole. Yet, in contemporary American politics, pluralism is rarely invoked as a theoretical guide, and when it is discussed, it is often as a foil for some alternative conceptual approach. So what happened to pluralism? In Neopluralism, Andrew McFarland seeks to explain what happened and to restore pluralism to a place of prominence in American politics and within the discipline of political science.

Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850–1937. By Susan Sterett. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 240p. $39.95.

Susan Sterett's book is a useful, although flawed, history of litigation in the states over municipal and state pensions for civil service employees. In particular, Sterett examines the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of state-level efforts to expand the scope of permissible state and local pensions, from firefighters and police officers to other civil service employees and finally to such groups as mothers and the elderly. Generally, state courts interpreted their constitutions to permit pensions for employees but not for the broader public, despite scattered efforts to argue that all labor should count as “service” to the public, meriting reward by state governments.

Regulation in the States. By Paul Teske. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004. 272p. $52.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Government regulation of economic activity is endemic to modern society; a vast array of everyday transactions are affected—and shaped—by rules and requirements imposed by governments. The intentions behind such regulations are typically assumed to be benign. Through regulation, governments can rectify problems caused by deceit, unaccounted costs, or unchecked power that would otherwise limit the scope and the effectiveness of markets. From a fiscal perspective, regulation is a relatively low-cost form of government activity. The budgets of regulatory agencies represent small items of government expenditure, compared with the budgets of agencies engaging in service provision or income redistribution. Because government regulation of economic activity is very often taken for granted and is of low salience to citizens, it is rarely the stuff of headline news. Among scholars, regulation has also tended to receive short shrift. Yet, as an area of public policy research, the study of government regulation deserves close scrutiny. At its best, research in this area can provide insights into the intersections of markets and governments, using the tools of positive political economy to good effect.

Bureaucrats, Politics, and the Environment. By Richard W. Waterman, Amelia A. Rouse, and Robert L. Wright. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 184p. $24.95.

This is not a book about the environment. Rather, it is an effort to improve existing models of bureaucratic behavior, especially in regard to how bureaucrats relate to the larger political environment. It relies on data from questionnaires from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Environment Department.

The Constraint of Race: The Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America. By Linda Faye Williams. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 440p. $35.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Linda Faye Williams's book seeks to identify “how, when and why American social policy became fused with the politics of race” and what that has meant for the development and evolution of the welfare state in the United States. The author's central argument is that the welfare state was “grafted onto preexisting conditions of race relations,” and the long-term consequence of this grafting is that even today, the organization of social policy in the United States continues to reproduce advantages for whites and disadvantages for many people of color. Further, as social welfare policy institutionalizes white advantage, this in turn tends to block movement in the direction of more universalistic social policy (p. 14). Williams supports this contention by revisiting the political history of social welfare policy, from just after the Civil War up to the Clinton administration's efforts at welfare “reform” in 1996.

On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000. By Julian E. Zelizer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 376p. $30.00.

Julian Zelizer's book joins a number of others that have been taking up the issue of congressional reform. Recent books by political scientists E. Scott Adler (Why Congressional Reforms Fail, 2002), Nelson Polsby (How Congress Evolves, 2003), and Eric Schickler (Disjointed Pluralism, 2001) are among a growing list that seeks to explain the success or failure of congressional reforms during the twentieth century. One of the interesting aspects of these books is that they are authored by mostly younger scholars who are reassessing, and sometimes seriously challenging, a genre of scholarship that was pioneered during the seventies by such scholars as Lawrence Dodd, Bruce Oppenheimer, Barbara Sinclair, and James Thurber, to name a few, many of whom were American Political Science Association Congressional Fellows working in Congress during the period of substantial congressional reform in the 1970s.

Transnational Politics of the Environment: The European Union and Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe. By Liliana Andonova. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. 224p. $57.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

After the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s, the 10 new emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) all sought to accede to the European Union. But to join the EU, applicant countries had first to adopt the vast array of existing EU laws, including a host of tough environmental laws. Some states coped more successfully with regulatory harmonization than did others, so what explains variation in their patterns of national adjustment?

Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Edited by Bruce E. Cain, Russell J. Dalton, and Susan E. Scarrow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 328p. $49.95.

For those who assume that within those countries we commonly consider to be the wealthiest and most stable liberal democracies, there exists a single shape, form, and formula for democracy itself, they need to consult this bold, innovative, and informative volume. Bruce Cain, Russell Dalton, and Susan Scarrow have edited a superb collection of 11 chapters (including the introduction), written by 15 internationally renowned students of comparative political analysis (including the editors), dealing with a simple and clear set of questions, namely: 1) Has representative democracy among the most industrially advanced liberal democracies of the world undergone a series of reforms during the past 20 years or so? 2) What is the nature and form of this reform? 3) In what way, if at all, has this change affected the quality and nature of democracy in these countries?

Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. By Kanchan Chandra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 368p. $80.00.

In the post-9/11 world where the “clash of civilizations” has moved beyond classroom debates to the public realm, it is refreshing, and challenging, to see a study that does not give ethnicity an easy ride. The title of this book is slightly misleading, though, because even while it concedes that appeals for political support on the basis of ethnic categories based on “race, caste, tribe or religion” (p. 2) are frequently made, sometimes with considerable success, it asserts that such tactics do not always succeed. When they do, it is not necessarily because of their putative appeal to sentiments but, instead, because both ethnic candidates and their supporters, rather than being swayed by appeals to their nonrational selves, are actually driven by sophisticated calculations of expected gain. Their utility calculus takes the size of the ultimate prize as well as the probability of winning it into account when they choose to align themselves with one set of politicians as opposed to another. Kanchan Chandra's parsimonious and general model explains why ethic parties in India, riding on Hindu or, for that matter, Tamil nationalism, succeed in some contexts but not in others.

The Rule of Law in Nascent Democracies: Judicial Politics in Argentina. By Rebecca Bill Chavez. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 272p. $55.00.

This book is a welcome addition to a young but growing body of scholarly work on rule-of-law construction in new democracies from a political science perspective. Rebecca Bill Chavez develops a persuasive study of the conditions under which rule of law is more likely to emerge, through an analysis of judicial politics at the national level in Argentina and in two of its provinces, San Luis and Mendoza.

The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future. By Elizabeth C. Economy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 368p. $29.95.

Most people are aware of China's severe environmental problems. The country's cities are among the world's most polluted; one of the major rivers sometimes fails to run to the sea; the desert is now only a few hours' drive from Beijing. China's falling water tables, transnational ecological impacts, thirst for energy, and emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances have made its environmental problems an urgent concern not only for its own citizens and policymakers but also for the world. A book that attempts to analyze the causes and implications of this situation is welcome.

Subnationalism in Africa: Ethnicity, Alliances, and Politics. By Joshua B. Forrest. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 279p. $55.00.

Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from states that are too weak to deliver services or even basic order to their peoples. Things really are falling apart, and challenged by a wide variety of locally based resistance movements or popular indifference, control by the center cannot hold. Joshua Forrest, author of solid monographs on Guine-Bissao and Namibia, takes on the challenge of describing and explaining the whole “process of political mobilization by regionally-based forces” (p. 1) that defy central authority, and for which he coins the term “subnationalism.” By this he includes a wide panoply of movements seeking autonomy, redress for grievances, secession, revenge, or old-fashioned plunder, so long as they are based on a population or region that is a subset of the juridical nation.

Social Protest and Policy Change: Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective. By Marco Giugni. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $32.95 paper.

The same things that provoke social movements also promote institutional pressures for change, shifts in public opinion, and policy change. As a result, disentangling the effects of protest on policy presents an ongoing analytical challenge. If we look, for example, at the volatile and diverse movement against the American war in Vietnam, it is virtually impossible to track clear lines of influence between the volume or disruptiveness of protests covered in the news and spending on the war or casualties produced in battle. At the same time, by reviewing memoirs, archives, and the broader outlines of policy, we know that the movement had longer-term effects, including (minimally), ending military conscription and establishing much stricter political and military tests for long-term commitments of American combat forces overseas. The latter set of constraints, codified as the Weinberger, then the Powell, doctrines, held sway over American military policy from the end of Vietnam until, finally, violated by the current American intervention in Iraq. At the same time, politicians of both parties vigorously try to reassure nervous youth, many of whom are children of the protest generation, that the draft is indeed gone for good. Clearly, the protests against the Vietnam war mattered, though perhaps not exactly in the ways that activists hoped or as much as they dreamed.

China's New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. By Peter Hays Gries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 224p. $24.95.

Arguments in the West over the existence of a “China threat” frequently atomize and even demonize China, as the author of the book points out at the beginning. Is Chinese nationalism benign or malign? The rise of Chinese nationalism in recent times has become an issue of great interest and importance to the world because of concerns over China's intentions as economic growth propels the country's ascendance onto the world stage. This timely account analyzes the sources and dimensions of the new nationalism, from what Peter Hays Gries calls the “rarely told Chinese side of the story” (p. 4). It is premised on a refreshing perspective that “to understand Chinese nationalism, we must listen to the Chinese” (p. 4). Gries's attempt to introduce Western scholars to the views of these new nationalists is an important contribution in itself, as so often mainstream views of Chinese nationalism in the West construe it as a tool to legitimize Communist Party rule. This book gets it right by taking Chinese nationalism seriously and treats it as a matter of genuine popular base and emotional content.