The central proposition advanced in this book is that incremental reform along neoliberal lines works. In Costa Rica, a slow-paced program of macroeconomic stabilization, fiscal cutbacks, economic deregulation, tax incentives for exporters, cessation of agricultural subsidies, and selected privatizations yielded “generally positive results” (p. 105). The economy recovered rapidly from the 1980s crisis and poverty rates fell back to precrisis levels, while the country's democratic stability was never in danger.

Josep M. Colomer's new book is a happy marriage of social choice theory with comparative politics. The book serves simultaneously as a primer to social choice and its empirical applications, as a theory of the evolution of political institutions, and as a normative argument in favor of inclusive, complex, and nonmajoritarian decision rules in democracies. On all these counts, Political Institutions is well worth reading, and including on syllabi.

Early studies of European integration presumed either the erosion and gradual disappearance of the nation-state (neofunctionalism) or its persistence and continued capacity to shape the integration process (intergovernmentalism). In both cases, the focus was on the supranational (European) level. For neofunctionalists, institutions and processes at the European level would eventually supplant those at the national level in importance, while for intergovernmentalists, the supranational level was the arena of bargaining and deal making between relatively coherent and self-interested states. The directional flow of activity and influence was from the national to the supranational, with national bureaucratic and nongovernmental actors shifting their interests and loyalties to the European level, or domestic actors seeking to shape national bargaining goals and strategies in the European arena.

Launching into Cyberspace provides a comparative analysis of the impact of the Internet on international relations. Focusing on five large and diverse regions of the world: Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia (India and China), Marcus Franda demonstrates that any analysis of the impact of the Internet has to take into account that the process of the integration and diffusion of information communication technologies (ICTs) varies enormously, not just from one region to the next but often from country to country. Consequently, the political scientist should be wary of drawing generalized conclusions about the impact of the Internet globally. Indeed, in many ways Franda's account of its impact provides a healthy degree of skepticism to many of the more technologically deterministic and “libertarian” accounts of the impact of ICTs. His account demonstrates that in nearly all of the countries examined, far from “withering away,” the state has played a decisive role either in creating a conducive environment for the Internet to develop or, conversely, in retarding its development by adopting regulations to administer and control access.

For a blow-by-blow historical narrative of the evolution of Japanese monetary and fiscal policy from the Plaza agreement to the point at which the American recession was beginning to nip Japanese recovery in the bud, this book would be hard to beat. It is a lucid, cogent account, based on a wealth of documentary and interview sources—albeit sometimes with a bit too much reliance on hindsight-rich analysis and self-justifying memoirs, rather than press reports of the policy arguments as they were presented at the time.

The European Commission is the powerhouse of the European Union. While its role in some respects does not look too different from most national bureaucracies—the formulation and implementation of policy—it is a much more powerful and influential administration than its national counterparts. The Commission acts with extraordinary autonomy from elected officials; if the Commission is stronger than national bureaucracies, the European Parliament is one of the weaker elected assemblies in Europe. Furthermore, the Commission has extensive rights (“a constitutional obligation”; p. 6) to initiate legislative processes, something that tends to tilt the politicobureaucratic playing field in its favor.

The questions of when and why new political parties decide to form and contest elections in established democracies are not new, but they have grown in importance over the last two decades. The rise of postmaterialist and nationalist parties across Western Europe has led to an increased focus on the causal factors involved in the formation and electoral success of new parties. In this new book, Simon Hug attempts to move beyond existing studies to create generalizable hypotheses capable of predicting when we should expect these phenomena to occur. It is innovative both in terms of its approach, which is explicitly game-theoretic, and in its goal to move toward a truly generalizable theory of new party formation (and, to some degree, success). Although there are some theoretical as well as empirical weaknesses in the work, Hug has made a laudable effort in his attempts to move the analysis of new party development beyond the bulk of existing descriptive case or class studies.