A Unified Theory of Party Competition: A Cross-National Analysis Integrating Spatial and Behavioral Factors. By James Adams, Samuel Merill, III, and Bernard Grofman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 311p. $70.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

The Logic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation. By Sona Nadenichek Golder. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. 209p. $49.95.

A Unified Theory of Party Competition “integrates the perspectives of spatial modeling and behavioral research” (p. xvii). It does so by expanding the usual set of assumptions that underlie spatial models, and by accounting for various aspects of voters' electoral behavior. Choices of campaign strategies by party elites, their decisions of what to propose to the voters, are directed toward the same objective as in the tradition growing from Anthony Downs's (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy—maximization of the vote that they receive in an election. When pursuing this goal, however, parties confront a richer environment of voters' preferences than spatial theorists customarily assume. James Adams, Samuel Merill, and Bernard Grofman take the Downsian criterion—policy distances between the voter and a party—as but one weighted component in the electors' utility functions. Other factors that compel a voter to support a particular party and which the authors include in order to incorporate “the full diversity of measured influences on the vote” (p. 228) are “partisanship, retrospective economic evaluations, and sociodemographic characteristics” (p. 228). Anticipating that the voters will choose with more than just the policy distances in mind, parties find themselves diverging in policy space as they compete for the vote. Thus, a more realistic set of behavioral assumptions with regard to the voters leads to more reasonable predictions for the location of party platforms than the convergence result characteristic of most spatial models. This furthers the authors' objective to improve the quality of the contribution of the spatial modeling literature to our understanding of the rationale behind the ways in which party systems are arranged in the world's democracies.

Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic. By Cindy Skach. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 151p. $29.95.

Comparative constitutionalism reigns high on the current academic agenda. Political scientists and legal scholars alike have been displaying a heightened interest in the comparative study of political organization through an analysis of constitutional structures and principles. As such, comparative studies of constitutional law open many new doors and raise new questions. As a result, any new contribution to this fast-growing field will certainly be measured by the degree to which its author can move the analysis along and, importantly, by how much this scholarly enterprise is undertaken and carried out with the awareness of the larger context of comparative constitutionalism.

Becoming Party Politicians: East German State Legislatures and the Decade Following Democratization. By Louise Davidson-Schmich. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. 232p. $27.50.

The democratic transitions in Eastern Europe have inspired a host of research that utilizes these changes as a laboratory for examining the enduring question of how democracies can become or remain stable. In Becoming Party Politicians, Louise Davidson-Schmich provides a unique contribution to this work by examining the behavior of East German state legislatures since unification. Davidson-Schmich uses the unusual case of East Germany much to her advantage. Robert Rohrschneider and others have used the division of Germany after World War II as a means of examining how mass and elite public opinion was influenced by the experience of communism, but Davidson-Schmich wishes to know how legislators' political behavior is constrained when democratic institutions—specifically political parties—act at odds with their socialized opinions and preferences.

Black Feminist Voices in Politics. By Evelyn M. Simien. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 196p. $71.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

Evelyn M. Simien makes three major contributions in this book. First, and most important, she uses insights derived from a black feminist theory that is largely literary to inform hard, number-crunching empirical research. Black feminist theorists from Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth to Kimberlé Crenshaw and bell hooks are used to derive operational definitions and testable hypotheses. Those seeking unity in the discipline would do well to study this book.

The Truce: Lessons from an L.A. Gang War. By Karen Umemoto. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 232p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The Truce, by Karen Umemoto, chronicles a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood that occurred between 1993 and 1994. Umemoto states that her “central concern” is “the relatively quick process through which rather harmonious social relations across racial boundaries are overcome by racial tensions and distancing, which set in place a more fractured pattern of race relations” (p. 5). The book, then, is primarily an analysis of the complex and changing dynamics of racial conflict, and the author uses the gang war to explore that conflict.

Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. By Kevin Deegan-Krause. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 352p. $65.00.

Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary. By Jason Wittenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 314p. $80.00.

The addition of Central and Eastern Europe to the laboratory of subjects for comparative politics is a welcome consequence of postcommunist transformation. Scholars of the region now draw more firmly on a repertoire of theory and methods from the discipline as a whole, as well as their historical insight and detailed understanding of particular countries within the region. These studies are exemplary in that regard. They pose clear questions arising from broad theoretical concerns, they answer them by mobilizing an array of qualitative approaches and sophisticated quantitative methods, and they structure their arguments by a series of building blocks with an explanatory focus.

Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis Under Communitarian Capitalism. By Marie Anchordoguy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 257p. $39.95.

Over the last 20 years, Japan has passed from wunderkind of global capitalism to problem child, troubled by recession and stagnation. Marie Anchordoguy's Reprogramming Japan joins the growing body of analysis diagnosing this sad falling off, focusing on the crisis of the high-technology sectors where silicon samurai once seemed to reign supreme. In Anchordoguy's view, the cause of the problem is “communitarian capitalism.” This is a capitalism that depends heavily on state direction—governmental support for select large firms, a social contract assuring citizens permanent employment, regular wage increases, and union–management deals for labor peace. This, she suggests, is something verging on socialism. Although it has “all the trappings of private property and profit-making institutions,” the dynamism of the market is constrained by a system that “favor[s] social stability over efficiency” (p. 7). It is, in her view, “quasi-capitalism” (p. 7). Communitarian capitalism, she argues, laid the basis for Japanese success from the 1950s through the 1970s, when global economic conditions were positive, technological trajectories were clear, and foreign products could be reverse-engineered. But in the 1980s and 1990s, intensified competition, transnational outsourcing, and fiercely enforced intellectual property rights made this system a fetter on the very forces of production it had fostered.

Global Liberalism, Local Populism: Peace and Conflict in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland. By Guy Ben-Porat. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 327p. $19.77.

Guy Ben-Porat's valuable book argues that contemporary globalization may transform conflicts and their resolution since it generates hegemonic crisis and fosters neoliberal interests among international and local players. Hence, interactions between localities and transnational capitalist forces may be a crucial predictor of the ways that conflicts have been managed, resolved, and reproduced. In this context, Global Liberalism, Local Populism analyzes the complexities of two protracted, violent clashes: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland.

Democratic Processes and Financial Markets: Pricing Politics. By William Bernhard and David Leblang. New York: Cambridge University Press 2006. 260p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99.

Imagine contemporary political economy as the electromagnetic spectrum. At one end are very long-run processes, such as the emergence of the political institutions that generate divergence between rich and poor countries in the world economy. At the other end are short-run phenomena, such as the movements in financial markets that we ponder while reading the stock pages with our morning coffee. For the last 10 years, William Bernhard and David Leblang have been exploring this latter end of the spectrum with clarity and rigor, and between them have pretty much defined the standards for the field.

Power from Experience: Urban Popular Movements in Late Twentieth Century Mexico. By Paul Lawrence Haber. University Park: Penn State Press. 2006. 320p. $55.00.

With social peace in Mexico unraveling just five years after the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted from power in 2000, it would seem an apt time for a new book-length study on urban popular movements in Mexico. This is ironic because by the end of the twenthieth century, most Mexicans were optimistic about the possibility that competitive, fair elections would settle questions of authority and law and that political parties would aggregate the interests of the electorate. However, half a decade later, disputes over federal elections generated mass demonstrations from primary to final balloting, urban protests repeatedly paralyzed downtown Mexico City, an ongoing war between drug cartels left thousands dead in the north and west of the country, riots in the village of Atenco near the capital turned deadly, human rights accusations marred police and military, and by the dawn of the new Calderon administration at the end of 2006, intractable plantones (occupations) and paramilitary violence were bringing federal troops into the sleepy colonial city of Oaxaca.

After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States. Edited by Lowell W. Barrington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 306p. $75 cloth, $29.95 paper.

As the editor states clearly in the introduction, the central question taken up in this useful volume is “What happens to nationalism after independence?” Its premise is that most scholarship on nationalism has attempted to trace or explain the emergence of the popular sentiments of solidarity that account for the formation of national consciousness, the rise of nationalism as a modern and highly potent political ideology, and the contribution of nationalism to the proliferation of states. Although there are excellent case studies of postindependence nationalisms in individual countries, less comparative and theoretical attention has been paid to conceptualizing and explaining variation in the intensity and character of nationalism in newly independent states.

The White Welfare State: The Racialization of U.S. Welfare Policy. By Deborah E. Ward. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 208p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

A growing literature (including works by Kenneth Neubeck, Noel Cazenave, Gwendolyn Mink, Jill Quadagno, Sanford Schram, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Martin Gilens) examines the racialization of welfare policies, welfare administration, and welfare politics. Deborah Ward's book contributes nicely to that literature. The contributors to this literature prove to be an interdisciplinary group and include scholars from history, policy studies, political science, and sociology. Ward's book offers insight to readers from all those fields, although policy-oriented readers may find they seek more analysis, or at least a broader discussion of the implications of the research.

Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America. Edited by Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 368p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is not very often that an edited book has the potential to carve a new niche in the field. This may be one of those rare volumes. The collection of essays edited by Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky lays out a promising research agenda, not only for Latin Americanists but for students of democratization in general.

Institutional Capital: Building Post-Communist Government Performance. By Laura Brunell. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. 270p. $59.00. cloth, $39.00 paper

This book makes an important theoretical contribution by opening the “black box” linking social capital and democratic performance. Spurred by Robert Putnam's observed correlation between social capital and budget promptness (Making Democracy Work, 1995), Laura Brunell seeks to explain the causal mechanisms connecting a vibrant civil society to good government performance.

Conflict and Compliance: State Responses to International Human Rights Pressure. By Sonia Cardenas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 188p. $65.00 cloth.

Norms protecting human beings from rights violations are growing, and international human rights pressures, like laws and sanctions, more and more escort them. But states are also subject to competing domestic pressures that make human rights violations attractive to some, and these countervailing forces make the business of compliance a tricky one. What happens when states face global norms to protect human rights but domestic opposition to implementing them? Sonia Cardenas, in her new book, provides an answer worth hearing.

Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms and Power. By Andrew Barnes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 288p. $35.00 cloth.

Andrew Barnes has produced an admirably complex book. While providing a lucid, readable, and persuasive analysis of the evolution of property relations in Russia during the 20 years from 1985, he avoids imposing artificially tidy theoretical schemes on the very messy processes he describes. Instead, he explores the full range of actors, institutions, strategies, and exogenous events that have shaped the struggle for property in Russia since the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. This is above all a work of history—a theoretically informed history, but history nonetheless—and it is therefore a work in which contingency is sometimes important, and one in which the question of which actors shaped which outcome, and why, is always an empirical one—never something determined by an ex ante assumption. In place of a spare, highly theoretical explanation of this or that aspect of Russian privatization, Barnes offers a complex but nevertheless comprehensible account of how contests for control of real assets have evolved hitherto and where they may be headed in the future.

Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies. By Thomas Carothers. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006. 272p. $57.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Thomas Carothers is a leading voice in the investigation of the success and failure of democratic transitions. Writing from the viewpoint of a practitioner, Carothers provides a unique perspective on the scholarly discussion of democratic transition and the actions of democracy assistance organizations. His previous insights into the weakness of the “transition paradigm” or modal framework that scholars use to study democratic transitions underscored important flaws: the expectation of linear democratic development, the lack of attention to state building, and the focus on democracy as the only potential outcome of the process. While most of these flaws have been extensively addressed in the second wave of literature on postcommunist transitions and other regions, it is undeniable that much of the early work suffered from a sort of groupthink that drew overly optimistic predictions about the success of regime transitions.

The State and the Global Ecological Crisis. Edited by John Barry and Robyn Eckersley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 307p. $67.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

The 12 essays offered in this book are a bit like an invitation to a New York cocktail party; the experience is impossible to fully anticipate from a first glance. And like a good cocktail party, this book is interesting not only for the content of the conversations but equally for what it reveals about the participants' relations, values, and assumptions, and even for what the guests might learn about themselves.

Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. By Daniel H. Deudney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 391p. $35.00.

Among books on international relations theory, this is one of the most important works to be published in recent years. Daniel Deudney synthesizes traditional IR theory with the logic of republican politics, producing a book that is as creative and original as it is erudite and sophisticated.

Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. By Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 376p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

This is a well-written, rigorous, empirical contribution to scholarship on immigration and ethnic relations in post–World War II Europe. The study adds particular value through its grounded evaluation of basic assumptions concerning multiculturalism. Ruud Koopmans and colleagues coded political claims of migrant, extreme-right, and pro-migrant/anti-racist actors in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as reported in a prominent newspaper in each country. These data inform the authors' assessment of whether migrant group makeup, national conceptions of citizenship, or supranational institutions drive the various actors' political behavior. The authors conclude that different national citizenship models best explain variations in political claims making. Postwar migration to Western Europe generates intense political conflict, according to the authors, because it raises questions about basic aspects of national sovereignty, including border control, citizenship attribution, and the principles of nationhood.