The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. By John Fabian Witt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 322p. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The development of workmen's compensation legislation is a subject of considerable historical interest. As the first major social insurance program adopted in the United States, it is also a story that may shed light on the broader question of why welfare state development in the United States differs so markedly from that observed in many other industrialized countries. In this engaging book, John Fabian Witt traces the development of legal ideas and public responses to the problem of industrial accidents during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is first and foremost a legal history, but it should nonetheless be of considerable interest to political scientists and, in particular, those interested in the subject of welfare state development. Witt argues that the problem of industrial accidents led to a series of legal and institutional responses that involved a fundamental reconceptualization of the problem of risk and that helped influence the subsequent development of the American welfare state through the New Deal years. More provocatively, he suggests that these legal and institutional responses were a contingent or accidental outcome. Alternative responses to the problem of industrial accidents might have led to an alternative path of welfare state development.

Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream By Janice Fine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 316p. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

The notion that immigrants need institutions of support as they try to make it in the U.S. economy is certainly nothing new. At the turn of the century, Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, beginning in Chicago with Hull House, made it their mission to provide the types of support that would ease immigrants' transition into American life. Janice Fine's Worker Centers is essentially a primer for activists on the role of worker centers as institutions designed to provide support to low-wage workers, especially immigrant workers in metropolitan areas. Defining worker centers as community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers, Fine considers the effectiveness of these centers in improving the lives of low-wage workers. She also raises an even larger question: Just what institutional mechanisms are necessary for integrating low-wage immigrants into American civil society so that they can derive the benefits of ongoing economic representation and political action?

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? By Philip E. Tetlock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 352p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This is a wonderful and important book. Philip Tetlock is a political psychologist who has a knack for innovative research projects (e.g., his earlier work on how people cope with trade-offs in politics). In this book, he addresses a question that would scare away more timid souls: How well do experts predict political and economic events?

Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. By Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 288p. $40.00.

In his seminal 1958 article (“Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position”), sociologist Herbert Blumer argued that we should understand race relations and racial prejudice especially as a “sense of group position.” Blumer's basic intuition is that individuals are organized by racial categories as groups and that group members are concerned about the relative position of their group in the racial hierarchy: Members of higher-status groups in particular react with many of the visible signs of race prejudice when their group's status is challenged. Lawrence D. Bobo and Mia Tuan offer possibly the most comprehensive exposition and explanation of that argument in their new book, Prejudice in Politics. First, Bobo and Tuan let us know exactly what group position theory is and how to make sense of it in comparison to other ideas about the nature of prejudice in politics. Along with group position, they examine the relevance of other theoretical explanations of prejudice, such as self-interest, clashing values, and symbolic racism. Then they use a unique survey to operationalize, compare, and contrast these competing ideas about prejudice in politics. In the end, they offer us the compelling idea that the “real” answer to understanding prejudice in politics lies not in eliminating alternative hypotheses but in a group position–oriented synthesis of these presumably competing ideas.

Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education Reform. By Susan E. Clarke, Rodney E. Hero, Mara S. Sidney, Luis R. Fraga, and Bari A. Erlichson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 264p. $69.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

This book, which had its origins in the Civic Capacity and Urban Education Project funded by the National Science Foundation and directed by Clarence Stone, examines the politics of race and education in four major U.S. cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Boston. Each of these cities is multiracial, with substantial populations of Latinos and Asian Americans as well as African Americans and Anglos. The authors' objective is to determine how new ethnic interest groups fit into the politics of education reform, a politics that historically had focused on educational equity in the context of black–white politics.

Lobbying for Inclusion: Rights Politics and the Making of Immigration Policy. By Carolyn Wong. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 225p. $50.00.

In 2006, unprecedented crowds took to the streets to protest proposed legislation in the House of Representatives that would have, among other things, made it a crime to “assist” undocumented immigrants to remain within U.S. borders. HR 4437, also known as the Sensenbrenner Bill, never became law, but it nonetheless sparked a fierce debate about immigration policy, which has divided the Republican Party in particular. Carolyn Wong's book provides a timely account of the making of immigration policy, commencing with the Hart Cellar Act of 1965 and proceeding through the last major piece of immigration in 1996.

Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America. By Kristin A. Goss. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 304p. $29.95.

If popular political movements attract the attention of a wide range of political scientists, this is the case, to no small degree, because they seem to bridge an impossible chasm. They seem to bridge—or at least to begin to build a bridge between—on the one hand, the lofty aspirations of democrats who invoke a language of government “by the people,” and on the other, the reality of modern democracies in which elites govern, while citizens judge their performances. When people vote, they affirm—or they reject—the leaders who make and enforce collective decisions. When people participate in popular movements, by contrast, they act in public to articulate and press claims about collective norms. When ordinary citizens participate in mass political movements, that is to say, they act collectively to exercise political power.

The Disorder of Political Inquiry. By Keith Topper. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 336p. $45.00.

The conceit framing Keith Topper's fine and necessary book is that the state of social science methods has grown so disordered it has even come to public attention, first when the journal Social Text unwittingly published Alan Sokal's parody of poststructuralist jargon and the now defunct Lingua Franca exposed the hoax, and then when the so-called Perestroika movement emerged to challenge dominant approaches in political science. Because the first instance attacked the perceived consequences of epistemic relativism in the social sciences generally and the latter the rigor mortis resulting from an allegedly hegemonic notion of scientific rigor in its discipline in particular, Topper's conceit allows him to play the role of Odysseus steering through the straits, lashed to his hermeneutic mast while shunning the Manichean siren songs of scientific monism to the one side and empty pluralism on the other, and heading for more open, ecumenical waters. It also enables him to claim that all this tacking to and fro has a public, political import. Indeed, he asserts that his primary concern in this book is “with a set of contemporary questions about the ways in which particular methodological commitments enable or constrain one's capacity to identify and act upon opaque power relations that sustain forms of domination” (p. 12).

The U.S. Women's Movement in Global Perspective. Edited by Lee Ann Banaszak. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 288p. $72.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This pathbreaking edited volume combines a classic article with 10 original essays to present a comparative examination of the women's movement. As the title indicates, analyses largely revolve around the U.S. case, with comparison carried out over time or in relation to cases in other countries. In bringing together this group of prominent and emerging scholars of women's movements to place the United States in international perspective, this volume works to fill a large gap in the literature.

Troubled Pasts: News and the Collective Memory of Social Unrest. By Jill A. Edy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 240p. $71.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

Jill A. Edy seeks to answer a difficult question: How do Americans construct a “collective” memory—as opposed to individual memories—of past events through the news media? Edy focuses her analysis on two case studies: the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She chose these cases because they were complicated, significant, newsworthy events when they occurred and each case became a basis of comparison for contemporary events. In 1992, South Central Los Angeles, including Watts, erupted into riots again after the acquittal of police officers who had beaten motorist Rodney King, and in 1996, the Democratic Party once again held its national convention in Chicago.

Ethnicity and Electoral Politics. By Jóhanna Kristín Birnir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 279p. $85.00.

Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment. By Erin K. Jenne. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 272p. $45.00.

The literature on ethnic mobilization has benefited considerably in recent years from a wave of innovative scholarship examining such ostensibly disparate issues as ethnic party formation, the psychological and emotional underpinnings of group violence, the utility (and disutility) of ethnic appeals by power-seeking elites, and the limits and benefits of civic associations as a means of ameliorating intergroup conflict. A common feature shared by this work is its focus on problem-oriented research questions, creative research design, a rigorous application of diverse methodological approaches, and, perhaps most importantly, the willingness to develop and empirically test potentially contentious theories. Jóhanna Kristín Birnir's Ethnicity and Electoral Politics and Erin K. Jenne's Ethnic Bargaining are reflective of these qualities and make strong contributions to the field of ethnic politics. Both books make striking claims about contemporary debates in communal politics research and employ a broad array of empirical tools to test their core hypotheses. At the same time, they diverge regarding the implications of political liberalization and the greater political latitude it affords organized ethnic communities.

Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States. By Ron Hayduk. New York: Routledge, 2006. 264p. $24.95 paper, $95.00 cloth.

The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror. By Stanley A. Renshon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 298p. $26.95 cloth.

Immigration is a powerful narrative in the history of the United States, at times evoking optimism and at other times providing fodder to foment xenophobia. These two books, authored by a pair of New York City–based scholars, share a common vantage point in the experience of the most racially and ethnically diverse city of immigrants in the United States. At the same time, the books are a study in contrasts, a neat fit to both ends of the spectrum between hope and fear. One is concerned with enhancing freedom and the other with maintaining order. One advocates expansion of political expression in the form of the franchise, the other recommends constraint. One looks to our nation's history—to our sometimes ignominious past of exclusion, as well as to expansive practices allowing noncitizen voting—and highlights inclusionary lessons to draw, and the other looks to the future and sees danger in a post-9/11 world of organized terror. Although distinctive in many ways, both books are passionately written, and one is compelled to read on whether cheering in agreement or taking umbrage, for the arguments will resonate regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum.

Why the French Don't Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. By John R. Bowen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 327p. $27.95.

Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. By Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006. 342p. $52.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The specter that haunts Europe these days is not, as in Marx's time, the specter of class struggle, nor is it, as it was for much of the twentieth century, the specter of communism; instead it is the specter of Islam. How should these nominally secular, historically Christian states handle the millions of people now in their midst, many of them migrants from former colonies, who identify as Muslims? Are there helpful precedents in histories of immigration or of mutual accommodation between states and religions? What are the reasonable limits of such accommodation and what are legitimate grounds for questioning the limits? What are the political stakes involved in assessments of the limits? And what does racism have to do with it?

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. By Marie Gottschalk. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 466p. $75.00 cloth, $28.99 paper.

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. By Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 384p. $29.95.

Punishment and Inequality in America. By Bruce Western. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. 224p. $29.95.

The American penal system has acquired an alarming rap sheet: Incarceration rates more than quadrupled from 1970 to 2005; African Americans are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites; more than five million Americans are barred from voting because of a felony conviction; and the United States incarcerates a greater proportion of its citizens than any nation in the world. Each of the three books reviewed here begins with some incantation of these daunting statistics, and from there they grapple with questions of the political causes and consequences of mass incarceration. What drives the contemporary prison boom, and how does mass incarceration in turn influence the distribution of political power, the mobilization of interest groups, and the citizenship of all those living under the ever-expanding criminal justice net?

Common Ground: Committee Politics in the U.S. House of Representatives. By John Baughman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 272p. $50.00.

A handful of scholars have devoted attention in recent years to the dynamics of standing committee jurisdictions in the U.S. Congress. This is an important focus because congressional rules and procedures give committees a central role in the legislative process and because the increasingly complex policy environment of recent decades has made clear demarcations of subject matter jurisdiction more difficult. How Congress resolves overlapping committee jurisdictions can affect both the deliberative quality and the substantive outcomes of policymaking. This is an important point of departure for reading John Baughman's new book.

Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare Policy. By Cathy Marie Johnson, Georgia Duerst-Lahti, and Noelle H. Norton. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. 261p. $55.00.

Creating Gender compels us to “make ordinary the analysis of gender in policymaking” (p. 228). As such, the authors “take up the question of how gender is created when policy is made” (p. 11) using an intimate and in-depth exploratory analysis of welfare policy in the United States to make their case. Their analysis is based on a “compound gender ideology framework” (p. 228), an original construction of the three authors designed to unravel and reveal gender ideology in the policymaking arena—specifically, the “adoption and implementation of the PRWORA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act)—welfare reform” (p. 11).

Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq. By Eric Davis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 385p. $60.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.

What is the relationship between state power and historical memory? Eric Davis argues that the focus on overt state repression that has dominated studies of Iraq overlooks the state's use of historical memory as a mechanism of control. Employing a Gramscian model, he examines how successive Iraqi regimes have sought to use historical memory to claim legitimacy and authenticity and thus undermine political challengers. Yet these state-initiated projects remain incomplete, and Davis concludes that the political and social instability of Iraq is in large part due to “the inability of Iraqis to construct a viable model for political community” through a shared vision of historical memory (p. 2). His two main themes—the efforts of successive regimes to put historical memories to political use and the diverse ways in which the intelligentsia support or challenge these projects—are documented in impressive detail. After an introductory theoretical chapter, the argument unfolds largely in chronological fashion, beginning with the formation of the Iraqi intelligentsia and competing visions of modern Iraqi historical memory. The majority of the book is then devoted to a systematic examination of these themes from the early twentieth century through fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005. By Patrick J. McGuinn. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 320p. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is an attempt by the federal government to regulate educational policy in the 50 states. By imposing on states a set of standards, benchmarks of yearly progress, and imposing sanctions on failing schools, the U.S. Department of Education has made a significant step from being more than a federal bully pulpit and a perch for fading politicians to a genuine ministry of education. This is ironic because the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states educational policy, except when it comes to enforcing civil rights. The strong bipartisan support for NCLB is a political, policy, and constitutional sea change in American history. How—and more importantly, why—did this happen?

Changing White Attitudes Toward Black Political Leadership. By Zoltan L. Hajnal. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. 230p. $65.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.

In his book, Zoltan Hajnal probes the reason for increased white support of black candidates at the local level. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to the literature on race and voting behavior. Contrary to previous work that claims that white vote choice in elections featuring black candidates is a function of white prejudice or backlash, Hajnal proffers a more nuanced information model of vote choice. When white voters first face the prospect of black elected leadership, they resist and organize against black candidates because of racial stereotypes, fears that the quality of life in the city will deteriorate, and fears that black elected leaders will initiate policy changes that will benefit blacks at the expense of whites. However, when these fears do not materialize, whites sharply lower their resistance and even begin to support black candidates in greater numbers.

Madison's Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. By Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. By Arjen Boin, Paul 't Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt Sundelius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 182p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

No undergraduate public administration course would be complete without at least a perfunctory attempt to summarize the never-ending debate about what public administration is. From Woodrow Wilson to “scientific management” to the Brownlow Committee to the Willowbrook Conference and beyond, the position papers and studies pile up; yet the debate (which often seems more like a monologue) continues. Students find this debate unsatisfying, and it is easy to see why. For a craft that prides itself above all on its relevance to practical affairs (as Woodrow Wilson put it, administration is “government in action”), the arguments that students are most often exposed to have the arid scholasticism of medieval disputes about angels dancing on pins. If public administration is so practical, students must be thinking, why cannot its theorists just cut to the chase and tell us how to do it? Or even what it is?