Despite the Odds: The Contentious Politics of Education Reform. By Merilee S. Grindle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 288p. $55.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

No one argues with the claim that education is a necessary ingredient for any recipe for economic and social development. With higher rates of literacy and numeracy, with more years of schooling, a cornucopia of benefits emerge—from lower birth rates to healthier workers to more autonomous women to more engaged citizens. And yet despite the recognition that everything good comes from education, expanding and reforming public education is a costly and contentious process in all political systems. Scholars and politicians alike are pessimistic that educational reform can be instituted. Given the costs and the conflict, what can explain successful implementation of educational reforms?

Democratic Reform in Africa: The Quality of Progress. Edited by E. Gyimah-Boadi. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 351p. $59.95 cloth, $23.50 paper.

There are fads in political science and in the policy world and the 1990s produced a prominent example: the decade's virtually universal infatuation with democracy. The end of the Cold War seemed to have removed the last remaining impediments to democracy—communist tyranny and subversion—and around the world, humankind's natural inclination toward freedom and equality was expected to be exhibited in heart-warming periodic elections. Or so it seemed. Policymakers celebrated the collapse of authoritarian regimes and welcomed new nations into the community of democracies; political scientists busied themselves with analysis of the mechanics of transitions to democracy, the technicalities of democratic institutions, and the myriad contributions of civil society.

Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU. Edited by Richard K. Herrmann, Thomas Risse, and Marilynn B. Brewer. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 328p. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The extent to which people in European countries are becoming more European in their identity is the subject of this very timely book, which presents important new empirical data on the Europeanization of identities. A variety of approaches, ranging from social psychology and political science to ethnographic and discourse analysis, explores the many ways European identities are being transformed. The contributors want to establish the degree to which both citizens and elites identify with Europe and how such forms of identification relate to other identities, in particular, national identities. The aim of the volume is less theoretical and philosophical abstraction than to devise middle-range approaches to measuring transnational identity and to assess its impact and significance.

Development Projects for a New Millennium. By Anil Hira and Trevor Parfitt. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. 216p. $74.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This book fills a vacuum for those interested in development policy and administration. Development administration has been a subfield very much in limbo for the past two decades as the market and civil society have attracted prime interest among development analysts and practitioners. Anil Hira and Trevor Parfitt argue that development assistance agencies, such as the United States Agency for International Development, its bilateral counterparts in Europe, and the World Bank, continue to insist on a mode of operation that perpetuates the same weaknesses that were identified in earlier literature on development administration and management. These agencies insist on short time spans for the activities that they fund. They treat these projects as if void of people. They fail to share information with potential beneficiaries. Above all, they do not hold themselves to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that they impose on recipients of their aid. With more and more development activities being carried out by community-based organizations and other nongovernmental bodies, these aid agencies have increasingly become part of the problem, not just the solution. The gap between donor and recipient has simply become too big to overcome.

Political Parties After Communism: Developments in East-Central Europe. By Tomáš Kostelecký. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002. 240p. $25.95.

Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe. By Ingrid van Biezen. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 256p. $69.95.

Much previous work on political parties and party systems in new democracies has examined them as a means to democratic consolidation and regime stability. Two new studies seek to give finer-grain comparative analysis of party development in the relatively successful new democracies of Southern and East Central Europe. Tomáš Kostelecký's Political Parties After Communism aims to give a broad overview of the development of party politics in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Kostelecký first outlines the historical evolution of parties in the four cases from the midnineteenth century until the collapse of communism and then gives a detailed survey of the development of parties and electoral politics between 1989 and 2002. Subsequent chapters take a more thematic approach, reviewing and synthesizing a range of research to assess the impact of political culture, historical legacies, social cleavages, and the institutional “rules of the game” on party development. A concluding chapter weights these different factors and seeks to highlight broader trends across the region. These are then contrasted with current patterns of party development in Western Europe.

Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside. By Marcus J. Kurtz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 264p. $70.00.

Marcus Kurtz makes his contribution to a sizable body of works examining the impact of economic liberalization on political opening in Latin America, arguing that the countryside in Latin America offers us a crucial piece of the puzzle of why transitions to democracies may succeed despite widening social inequalities. The answer to this paradox, Kurtz argues, is that “competitive national-level democracy [is] based in part on conservative hegemony and peasant quiescence in the countryside” (p. 21). He contends that processes put in place by market-based policies, rather than coercion or clientelism, explain why peasants and rural workers continued to back the politicians who initiated and deepened programs of credit deregulation, price liberalization, and trade opening. Thus, the grim lesson of Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside: If those with the most to lose in neoliberal conditions are quickly atomized and dispossessed by transitions to market-based conditions, competitive multiparty electoral systems will endure at national levels. Or, in a semantic twist worthy of Alice in the rabbit hole, in modern conditions, democracy thrives on a certain lack of it.

Privileging Industry: The Comparative Politics of Trade and Industrial Policy. By Fiona McGillivray. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 224p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Of the various transnational economic linkages, international trade is the most explicitly and persistently political. It is also very closely tied to industrial and investment policies in domestic political economies. In this tightly and clearly argued book, Fiona McGillivray comes to terms with the political dimensions of trade and industrial policy by focusing on how electoral rules, strength of political parties, and industrial geography affect trade policy, and she provides a persuasive argument about the conditions under which politicians act to redistribute income toward particular industrial sectors.

The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation. By Michael Moran. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 256p. $65.00.

Drawing on experienced scholarly observation, Michael Moran has written a strikingly critical evaluation of Britain's recent development of state regulatory authority. Its now legalistic form more nearly resembles the long-prevalent American pattern. Perhaps the British development would seem to follow from the privatization of industries in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Enterprises like railroads, telecommunications, and electricity are no longer government corporations but privately owned “public utilities,” to use the American term for businesses especially affected by the public interest. For Moran, however, other forces also help account for the growth of regulation in Britain. He persuasively argues that legal regulatory authority has also been extended to several enterprises not previously nationalized and then privatized.

Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior. By Pippa Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 390p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

Over 20 years ago, William Riker proposed that the study of electoral systems and their consequences constituted the best-developed research program in contemporary political science. Scores of scholars followed Maurice Duverger's lead, emphasizing how institutions affect the strategic environment facing political actors and the contours of party systems. Other researchers followed Seymour Martin Lipset's and Stein Rokkan's lead, privileging social cleavages as the main features influencing party system development. Recently, scholars have attempted to reconcile or integrate the competing approaches. Pippa Norris's new book fits into this trend by evaluating the two schools of thought side by side, harnessing valuable data produced by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).

The Economic Effects of Constitutions. By Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. 320p. $35.00.

Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini have produced the most ambitious study yet that attempts to identify and estimate the effects of constitutional design on economic outcomes. They draw on data from more than 80 countries and control for demographic, historical, regional, and economic characteristics. The purpose is to determine whether the shape of political institutions has measurable impact on economic policies (e.g., fiscal balance, social welfare spending), on government performance (e.g., corruption indices, protection of property rights), and on direct measures of economic performance (e.g., productivity of capital and labor). The political institutions that draw the most attention are constitutional regime type and the method of electing legislators.

Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000. By M. Anne Pitcher. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 320p. $60.00.

Mozambique provides a sharp contrast with transition in much of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and even Asia. A Marxist movement (Frelimo) took power in 1975, pledging to construct a socialist state. Only 15 years later, a new constitution made no reference to socialism. By 1994, Mozambique was a multiparty democracy and one of the World Bank's “model” market reformers. Yet Frelimo remains in power, presiding over the private economy it once denounced. Why and how did this happen?

Learning from Foreign Models in Latin American Policy Reform. Edited by Kurt Weyland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 320p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The purpose of this important volume, whose contributors include both policy practitioners and academics, is to “elucidate the cognitive and political processes that shape the diffusion of models in contemporary Latin America” (p. 2). In his introductory chapter, Kurt Weyland lays out a series of questions to help frame an assessment of the impact of foreign models on Latin American social policy reforms during the last two decades. When do policymakers turn to external models? What turns a country's policy practices into a model for others? How is information about a particular model spread abroad? What is the impact of transmitted models on policy decision makers and how, if at all, are they adapted to local conditions? Weyland argues that the concept of “learning” is better suited to addressing these questions than either the traditional rational choice or structuralist approaches alone, since learning creates “important filters between objective reality and actors' attitudes and actions” (p. 6). Various heuristic shortcuts are taken by policymakers that significantly alter the expected cost–benefit calculation that, it is often assumed, decides the diffusion of foreign models. This framework is applied fairly consistently in a series of case study chapters that focus on three social sector reforms carried out in the region: pension systems (Argentina, Brazil), unemployment insurance (Brazil, Chile) and health care (Colombia, Mexico).

From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation. By Barry Buzan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 318p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

The English School of international relations has been principally concerned with understanding the society of states, but some of its members have commented on its relationship with world society. Hedley Bull and Martin Wight noted that the architects of the modern society of states derived some of their political vocabulary from medieval conceptions of world society. Bull maintained that natural law images of a world society survived in the modern doctrine of universal human rights. Whether a world society was likely to develop in the first universal society of states was a question of great importance to Bull and John Vincent. The former referred to an emerging “cosmopolitan culture of modernity” that could underpin order between radically different societies in “the post-European age”; the latter believed a global culture that established the right of every human being to be free from starvation could perform that function. However, most members of the English School have denied that the modern society of states is likely to be dissolved in a world society. Indeed, Wight argued that from the Reformation, rival conceptions of world society have often had a divisive effect on international relations. Barry Buzan's most recent book is the first work by a member of the school to consider world society since Vincent's call for the more systematic investigation of the concept almost 15 years ago.

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. By Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 596p. $90.00 cloth, $32.99 paper.

This book is based on the assumptions that the regional level of security has always been important, has grown in importance over the past seven or so decades, and has emerged as especially prominent with the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, neorealists are unable to recognize the increasing importance of regional interactions because they focus exclusively on the global level. Equally regrettable is the fact that newer globalization perspectives are unable to capture regional security relations adequately because they, too, severely downgrade the importance of states and/or assume that reactions to forces like globalization do not meaningfully differ across regions. Consequently, these prominent theoretical schools are increasingly unsuccessful at making sense of reality.

The Future of Money. By Benjamin J. Cohen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 312p. $29.95.

Benjamin Cohen has produced yet another excellent volume on the political economy of international monetary affairs, this time with a worthy successor to his previous opus, The Geography of Money (1998). Like most of Cohen's scholarship, The Future of Money displays the author's remarkable facility with the vast breadth of issues, theories, puzzles, and esoterica associated with monetary matters, as well as a confident command of monetary policy and history. Future is perhaps less ambitious than Geography, but it is tight, well argued, and not wanting for important claims.

Intervention: Shaping the Global Order. By Karen A. Feste. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003. 304p. $64.95.

Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas. Edited by J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 362p. $75.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

To intervene or not to intervene? This question has dominated global politics over the past five years, in regions as diverse as the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Sudan. Yet the question is as old as international relations and is a logical extension of the institution of sovereignty. Indeed, it was with the rise of sovereign states that the notion of an exclusive jurisdiction, free from the meddling of outsiders, came to have normative value. Since that time, as Karen Feste notes, patterns of intervention have shaped the international system, “defining contours of connection between its units, guiding interaction, and creating operational expectations” (p. xiii).

Religion, Civilization, and Civil War: 1945 Through the New Millennium. By Jonathan Fox. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 312p. $75.00.

Jonathan Fox's book makes a very important contribution to the ongoing debate on the impact of religion on domestic conflict. On the one hand, the author takes issue with Samuel Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis. As many others before him, Fox does not find much quantitative support for Huntington's bold expectations: We neither experience a major reorganization of international relations along civilizationally defined fault lines nor observe a significant increase in the number of violent disputes involving parties from different civilizations. On the other hand, he objects to those recent studies according to which the onset of civil wars is determined by political and economic factors, while religion is found to be largely irrelevant (see, for instance, James Fearon and David Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97 [no. 1, 2003]: 75–90, or Errol Henderson and David J. Singer, “Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946–92,” Journal of Peace Research 37 [no. 3, 2000]: 275–99). By using data both from the Minorities at Risk Project (MAR) and the State Failure Project (SF), Religion, Civilization, and Civil War provides strong evidence that religious identity—whether the conflict involves two groups who belong to different religions or to different denominations—and, even more so, religious grievances do influence conflict escalation. This can be best studied when the crude distinctions of Huntington are questioned and religious diversity within civilizations is recognized.

European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society. By Paul Keal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 274p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Paul Keal's study of the position that indigenous peoples have occupied in international society is best read as a critical contribution to the work of the “English School” of international relations theory. Members of this school have long had an interest in relationships between European and non-European peoples, usually understanding them in terms of the expansion of the European society of sovereign states. Keal takes this as his starting point, but he criticizes it as “incomplete” because “it has excluded the story of peoples destroyed and dispossessed in the process of expansion” (p. 36). The purpose of his book is to broaden our understanding of the expansion of international society to include those stories, and so invite us to think more critically about the moral value of the society of states.

How Democracies Lose Small Wars. By Gil Merom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 310p. $65.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.

The essence of Gil Merom's argument in this book is that democratic strong actors cannot win small wars because these states are constrained by society to avoid the sacrifice—in both sustained and inflicted casualties—necessary to win: “My argument is that democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory. They are restricted by their domestic structure, and in particular by the creed of some of their most articulate citizens and the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such citizens. Other states are not prone to lose small wars, and when they do fail in such wars it is mostly for realist reasons” (p. 15). Merom adds that “[e]ssentially, what prevents modern democracies from winning small wars is disagreement between state and society over expedient and moral issues that concern human life and dignity…. Achieving a certain balance between … the readiness to bear the cost of a war and the readiness to exact a painful toll from others—is a precondition for succeeding in war” (p. 19).

The Structure of Regulatory Competition: Corporations and Public Policies in a Global Economy. By Dale D. Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 336p. $99.00.

Dale Murphy addresses the study of globalization, specifically global regulatory competition, with the careful empirical work of a former banker and the analytical bite of a political science scholar. The result is a coherent theoretical statement about when, and under what conditions, states will dismantle regulations (the colloquial “race to the bottom,” or “competition-in-laxity” as Murphy labels it), harmonize them to the highest level (a trend David Vogel named the “California effect”), or allow heterogeneous regulations to prevail. What sets Murphy's book apart from other political science scholarship in this area is that he abandons the assumption that corporations have monolithic regulatory preferences, and instead unpacks the “black box” of the corporation. He then gives corporate preferences weight in the regulatory process. Thus, the motivations and preferences of corporations are significant drivers of a state's regulations, and determine whether regulations will be harmonized upward or downward in international regulatory competition: “Powerful firms exert influence but they do not seek a monotonic goal; one must identify each firm's different interests. Over time, these preferences will shape state regulations” (p. 9).