James Adams provides a compelling and innovative book on elections and political party competition in France, Great Britain, and the United States. It unites theoretical modeling and data analysis to help us understand how parties in multiparty democracies compete when citizens both are partisan and care about the issue positions of the parties.

Political science is slowly catching up with the initiative process. Direct citizen decision making on laws has long been a feature of many American states, particularly those in the West. Although there has been a steady increase in the number of ballot measures that have qualified since the 1960s, including measures like California's Proposition 13 that ushered in the “tax revolt” of the early Reagan era, use of initiatives in the states reached a new peak in the 1990s. In that decade, there were nearly four hundred initiatives on state ballots—far more than during any other decade.

Political scientists constantly debate the value of public participation in policymaking. In philosophical terms, the debate seems onesided —participation is, on balance, a good thing in a system that calls itself a democracy. In more practical terms, however, the jury is still out, probably because scholars and participants alike have long vested in public participation almost impossible hopes and dreams. Not only is it supposed to keep government honest and open; participation also is supposed to produce more informed and thus “better” decisions, and in the process build greater civic capacity, trust, and legitimacy. Given the degree to which these expectations go unfulfilled, it is small wonder that three decades later, we still ask: Does participation make a difference?

There is no shortage of research that purports to tell us something new about globalization and its varied impacts on domestic politics and international relations today. Moreover, students mining this literature continue to find a broad spectrum of opinion on globalization, from those offering a strong state thesis that seemingly willfully ignores the many interdependent relationships states are entangled in today, to those embracing a weak state thesis that accepts the erosion of state sovereignty as a given. Edward Cohen's new book avoids these analytical traps, as he navigates through both popular and academic debates on globalization to produce a well-rounded and useful picture of a prosperous and hegemonic United States nonetheless increasingly agitated and divided internally over trade, immigration, and language policy at the end of the twentieth century.

Place Matters provides a deep, nuanced, and comprehensive summary of the new regionalist perspective on urban governance. Ably authored by a trio of accomplished students of urban politics, the book's thesis (p. 21) is that “where we live has a powerful effect on the choices we have and our capacity to achieve a high quality life.” That is, the often complex and fragmented jurisdictional arrangements of many American metropolises both exacerbate the social and economic ills that can be associated with urban life and delimit the range of opportunities available to all of their citizens for addressing these problems. This theme, of course, is not new. Indeed, the last two decades have seen a slow but steady emergence of the new regionalist perspective as a counterbalance to the now dominant public-choice emphasis on the virtues of jurisdictional fragmentation. Previously, the regionalist perspective was perhaps best reflected in David Rusk's Cities Without Suburbs (1993) or Anthony Downs's New Visions for Metropolitan America (1994). But neither of these books fully integrated the ideas of the new regionalist perspective into the broader range of theories about urban politics. Place Matters does so in a thorough and readily accessible manner.

For decades, the delegation problem has stoked theoretically rigorous, empirically taxing work in institutional political science. The central achievement of David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran's book is to posit clearly a trade-off between delegating internally and delegating externally. The authors compare delegation to the “make-or-buy” decision of the firm in industrial organization theory. It is the congressional “floor” (its median voter) that delegates, with the choice of handing policymaking to its committee system (internal) or to the executive branch (external). Either “agent” is capable of specifying statutory details or of learning about policy's probable consequences in a way that would be too costly for the floor to undertake. Yet neither has preferences identical to those of the floor, and so each confronts Congress with a classic “hold-up” problem.