Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States. By Daniel A. Smith and Caroline J. Tolbert. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. 252p. $65.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Throughout the mid-1980s, empirical state-level initiative studies were sufficiently rare that David Magleby's now classic book (Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States, 1984) addressed topics as varied as the status of direct democracy laws, the impact of various cues on voting choices, and the readability of ballot pamphlets. Research on the initiative process subsequently burgeoned, and direct democracy has become one of the most widely considered aspects of state politics. Quantitative studies have focused especially on the substantive impact of the initiative process on public policy, as well as on the extent to which campaign contributions influence electoral outcomes.

The Nation-State in Question. Edited by T. V. Paul, G. John Ikenberry, and John Hall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 400p. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

As John A. Hall notes in the introduction, many authors (including the present writer) writing in the 1990s questioned the future of the nation-state, which, to them, was coming under attack both from above—at the hand of global economic forces—and from below, at the hand of various national or ethnic revivals. As he also notes, the purpose of the volume under review is to question that question and see whether there is still some life left in the nation-state. To do so, he and his fellow editors have assembled an impressive battery of American, Canadian, and British scholars, each of whom has something interesting to say. Let us see, then, what they do say.

European Union Enlargement. Edited by Neill Nugent. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 328p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The well-known difficulty of reviewing edited books is in this case enhanced by the high number of relatively short chapters (19) and also by the double ambition of this collective enterprise. On the one hand, the book deals, as the title suggests, with the recent and momentous enlargement of the European Union by the 10 Central and Eastern European countries finalized in 2004. The ambition of the editor is, however, broader. Actually, five to six of the 19 chapters deal with “enlargements,” that is, with the whole set of territorial accretions of the Community/Union, starting from the 1973 opening to the three northern countries (Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark), the 1981/86 broadening to the southern (Greece, Spain, and Portugal), the 1995 inclusion of Austria, Finland, and Sweden, and, finally, the “10+2” enlargement, referring therefore also to the two pending candidates of Romania and Bulgaria.

God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh. By Ali Riaz. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 232p. $69.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Ali Riaz's book may be too easily dismissed as either glib or alarmist. It opens with an attention-getting question that is the title of Chapter 1: “Is Bangladesh Becoming a Taliban State?” Riaz's answer is startling: For reasons elaborated upon, “it becomes clear that a variant of Talibanism is on the horizon” (p. 11). The rest of the book is divided into chapters that support his thesis. There are copious detailed footnotes, an extensive bibliography, appendices that provide a useful chronology of political events, and descriptions of the leaders of Bangladesh.

The Invention of the United States Senate. By Daniel Wirls and Stephen Wirls. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 288p. $49.95 cloth. $18.95 paper.

In a meeting in Moscow some years ago, the former Soviet Union's principal Americanologist, Georgi Arbatov, complained to me quite seriously, “We study your system, and we still do not know how it works.” Probably one reason for Arbatov's expressed puzzlement had to do with the role played in the American governmental system by the United States Senate, of which, at the time of our conversation, I was a member.

Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden. By Peter A. Swenson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 448p. $24.95.

Peter Swenson has written a thought-provoking and edifying work of comparative political economy that examines the causal relationship between national differences in capitalist interests and divergent welfare state development. Given Swenson's ambitious challenge to many existing accounts of welfare developments and his detailed historical analysis, this book should attract some well-deserved attention.

Election Timing. By Alastair Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 286p. $75.00.

Alistair Smith has written, no doubt, the definitive book on the timing of elections in the United Kingdom. This, together with two party swings, is a subject that greatly concerns politicians and commentators in Britain. The conventional wisdom is that the choice of election date is a crucial decision for the incumbent prime minister, and that this choice gives the incumbent a considerable advantage. This follows from the ability of the incumbent to engage in “political surfing” (holding election when the government's popularity is at its highest) or to actively manage the political business cycle to achieve favorable economic conditions at the time of the election. Smith argues, however, that this advantage is overstated. The very act of calling an early election sends a signal to voters that the government has information about future performance that it wishes to hide from the voters. As a result, when governments call early elections, their actual vote share tends to be considerably less than the opinion polls before the announcement would suggest. For example, when Margaret Thatcher called early elections in 1982, she got 42% of the vote, as opposed to preannouncement polls of 48%.

When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 336p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Failed states have proliferated in the last 15 years. For much of this time Robert Rotberg has played a major role in defining debates about this development. His latest edited volume is a collection of 14 essays that examine why states fail and what to do about them once they fail. Most of the contributors are political scientists. A few are experts in conflict management and have worked directly in international efforts to remedy state failure.

New Risks, New Welfare: The Transformation of the European Welfare State. Edited by Peter Taylor-Gooby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 264p. $115.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

The comparative welfare state literature has taken some important turns in the past decades, moving first from a focus on the causes of its growth to studies of retrenchment. Lately, scholarship has become more preoccupied with welfare state adaptation to the new risk and needs structure. This book falls squarely in the latter camp and includes European scholars, such as Bruno Palier, Guiliano Bonoli, and Peter Taylor-Gooby, who have been exploring this theme for some years now.

Whose World Order? Russia's Perception of American Ideas After the Cold War. By Andrei P. Tsygankov. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 224p. $45.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

One consequence of the end of the Cold War has been the muddling of boundaries between Russian and Western, notably American, scholars. In my own experience, this has been all to the good. Social scientists at the University of Michigan have had, for instance, an ongoing relationship with their counterparts at the European University in Saint Petersburg (EUSP) for many years now. In our meetings, the distinctions between the Self and the Other (to use the constructivist jargon favored by Andrei P. Tsygankov in the book under review) have often been rather arbitrary. The intellectual divide we have most frequently encountered has been between those of us, Russians and Americans, who attach relatively greater weight to the role of culture and those for whom institutions matter more, a divide that separates us more by disciplinary background than by citizenship or where we teach.

Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. By Edward E. Telles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 336p. $35.00.

Edward E. Telles's consideration of race in Brazil is a landmark study. It brings scholarly perspective, the careful application of quantitative data, systematic analysis, a thoughtful reading of contemporary conditions, and a deep familiarity with the subject to a frequently fragmented, contradictory, and anecdotal area of scholarship.

That Eminent Tribunal: Judicial Supremacy and the Constitution. Edited by Christopher Wolfe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 256 p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

“Constitutional law professors have been very upset lately with the U.S. Supreme Court” (p. 181). So begins Keith E. Whittington's contribution to this collection of 11 essays on the subject of, in the words of the subtitle, “judicial supremacy and the Constitution.” Many in the unhappy chorus mentioned by Whittington are mainstream legal academicians who decry the conservative judicial activism sometimes practiced by the Rehnquist Court; they long for a robust activism in defense of liberal political values that characterized Warren and some Burger Era rulings. But the contributors to this book are not members of that chorus. Instead, most question or condemn the liberal activism preferred by the legal mainstream, while a few reject both styles of activism and hanker for a modest judicial role characterized by editor Christopher Wolfe as “traditional judicial review” (p. 202).

Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China. By Dali L. Yang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 432p. $60.00.

Dali L. Yang argues a thesis many would like to find true. In China, he argues, markets have created pressure for limited, effective, and transparent government. Crises in the 1990s and since led Chinese leaders to implement reforms with these goals. They have achieved considerable if not complete success, and this leaves China better prepared for democracy. This thesis is most clearly stated in the conclusion. The first chapter offers an introduction and historical overview. Each of the intervening seven chapters documents and assesses a particular type of reform.

How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. By Kathleen Thelen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 352p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The theory of evolution is under attack. In this case, however, the attacker, Kathleen Thelen, comes armed with far more plausible evidence than the proponents of “intelligent design,” and the creatures being analyzed are not plants and animals but key economic institutions, such as vocational training systems, organized labor, and employer organizations.

Explaining Foreign Policy: U.S. Decision-Making and the Persian Gulf War. By Steven A. Yetiv. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 296p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Steven A. Yetiv faces a daunting task in this case study of the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War: applying and reconciling multiple approaches to foreign policy analysis in a single volume. He also hopes to clarify the historical record regarding President George H. W. Bush's performance in the diplomatic and military clash. While this ambitious study advances our understanding in both respects, it demonstrates how much further the field of foreign policy analysis must still progress to see clearly within the “black box” of state decision making.

Moving Money: Banking and Finance in the Industrialized World. By Daniel Verdier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 326p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Although it may seem arcane or prosaic to some, the literature on the political economy of money and finance has burgeoned within political science since the mid-1980s. The two decades after the end of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s was a time of considerable macroeconomic volatility and cooperative effort to coordinate suitable policy responses. This stimulated scholarly inquiry. Since then, financial globalization has drawn in those interested in the challenge financial markets seem to pose to the official political order centered on states. This developing political science research tradition has, however, existed on the periphery of two other longer-standing literatures. The first is the economic history of monetary and financial affairs. This tradition has exhaustively investigated the formation, organization, and implications of the classical gold standard and the Bretton Woods order. This research stimulated many of the political science pioneers and remains seminal and vibrant. The other tradition to mention is that impulse in the social sciences to identify and characterize different forms, tendencies, or cycles in capitalism, and link these to distinct political and social orders. This much more controversial way of thinking has its origins in the great nineteenth-century systems of ideas. In more recent times, Karl Polanyi, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Alexander Gerschenkron, John Zysman, and the many authors associated with core-periphery and world systems theory have kept the tradition alive. Although many readers will assume Daniel Verdier's new book is unproblematically part of the political science tradition, it should be read squarely as a product of this last tendency, making use of the established historical work to generate a reinterpretation.

People out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap. Edited by Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir. New York: Routledge, 2004. 272p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The original essays in this anthology make a significant contribution to the ongoing debates about citizenship, human rights, and the future of the nation-state by exploring the contradictory impacts of globalization on the provision of individual rights. On the one hand, the transnational flows of people, capital, and technology associated with globalization have led to a deflation of citizenship rights, particularly for members of vulnerable groups, and created large noncitizen populations with significantly fewer rights than citizens. Yet on the other hand, the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization, such as the evolution of human rights and the expansion of liberal legal norms, create new levels of membership and new venues in which to claim rights. The book has two related goals. The first is to describe the complicated processes by which globalization is altering the nature of nation-state citizenship and creating a “citizenship gap” among global elites, legal citizens, marginalized citizens, and migrants. The volume's second goal is to determine whether the cosmopolitan aspects of globalization can remedy the citizenship gap. Will existing nation-state citizenship and emerging universal rights regimes be sufficient to protect the rights of marginalized citizens and noncitizens? Or must human rights be embedded in global governance in order to close the citizenship gap?

Helping Children Left Behind: State Aid and the Pursuit of Educational Equality. Edited by John Yinger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 145p. $40.00.

The role of state courts in defining educational finances is the focus of this book that results from a 2001 conference in the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. The author explores the role of state appellate courts since the seminal case of Serrano v. Priest (1971) challenging the constitutionality of local property taxation to fund local schools. About one-half of subsequent state courts followed suit, but the other half did not.

Human Rights in Russia. By Jonathan Weiler. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004. 165p. $49.95.

This is a revisionist book. Jonathan Weiler breaks with the fundamentally positive vision of post-Soviet “reform and democratization” that prevailed among Western analysts of Russia during perestroika and the Yeltsin years, and still dominates American and European governments' policy.

Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace, Weapons of War. By Patricia A. Weitsman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 264p. $49.50.

Patricia Weitsman sets out to provide a unified theory of alliance politics that explains when states will manage threatening neighbors by allying with them rather than allying against them, when allies will undertake different types of military obligations, when alliances will be more or less cohesive, and how alliances aimed at preserving peace sometimes provoke war. Although she is not entirely successful in fulfilling this extensive agenda, Dangerous Alliances is nevertheless a constructive contribution to several ongoing debates about alliance politics.