It is important at the outset to counter any skeptic's expectation that Paul Gronke is trying to prove that all House races and Senate races are created equal. It is to his credit that he does not try to substantiate such a sweeping generalization. Rather, he very convincingly demonstrates that there is considerable overlap between House and Senate races in terms of competitiveness, intensity, campaign message effectiveness, quality of challengers, and level of voter information. Resisting the urge to engage in hyperbole, let me say that this is a very good book.

This edited volume begins with the premise that the American public's dislike of government is a problem; there is too much negative sentiment about government. The editors pose a number of questions, among them how to fashion reforms in order to create a “style of government that would make the people happy” (p. 1). Consistent with their important new work on “stealth democracy,” John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that this unhappiness is not the result of policy outcomes at odds with citizen preferences, but is instead rooted in the rancorous public process of political sausage making. They take issue with the notion that more voice through deliberation should lead to greater approval of government, and suggest instead that people would feel a lot better if democratic processes minimized the influence of special interests and maximized representation of a “public interest, [that] by its very nature, is concerned with the welfare of all salt-of-the-earth Americans” (p. 249).

Offering a political scientist's view of the evolution of banking regulation in the United States, Susan Hoffmann approaches the creation of banks, savings and loans, and credit unions from the perspective of “public philosophies” about money, banking, and credit. She devotes a chapter to the early debates between Jefferson and Hamilton over the desirability of corporations over all, as well as banks specifically, then analyzes the First and Second Banks of the United States (BUS) with a chapter each. The development of vibrant state banking systems, followed by the imposition of a new national banking system in the Civil War, receives attention in its own chapter, as does the Federal Reserve Bank. She then concludes with a chapter each on the Savings and Loans (S&Ls) and building and loans, and the credit union system.

James Kuklinski has assembled a remarkably valuable set of articles addressing the general question of citizens’ political competence and political decision making. This book is the tenth installment in the distinguished series “Cambridge Studies in Political Psychology and Public Opinion.” Divided into four sections covering affect, cognition, perception, and values, the book is organized much like panel sessions at a professional meeting. Kuklinski provides an extended introduction to each section, and three articles by some of our most talented researchers form the core of each section, followed by invited commentary critiquing those articles. Absent from the collection is a summary chapter, which could have gone a considerable distance toward providing a general model of public opinion formation and functioning, but if you are looking for the most innovative, cutting-edge articles on how citizens make sense of politics, there would be no better place to begin than this work.

Jan Leighley's examination of racial and ethnic minority mobilization is an important contribution toward understanding issues the American polity faces as its population becomes increasingly diverse. She points to the rapid shift in population composition in a number of states in which whites will no longer be the majority, and she considers the political implications of these changes for democratic institutions, for the groups which are part of this changing electorate and for the political science literature which has based its theoretical findings on research on Anglos. Leighley explores the mobilization of groups, how American political institutions have responded to and how they mobilize racial and ethnic groups, and she reviews several different types of literatures’ analyses of political participation and mobilization as she offers a rational choice interpretation of the subject. This is a complex book, which helps increase our understanding of the variety of issues, methodological, conceptual, and measurement based, which scholars must address in order to broaden knowledge in this area.

The field of Asian American politics is not uncharted terrain in American politics research, but it is certainly underexplored. The relative lack of scholarly attention, however, is likely to change, since Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States and have occupied this position for the last several decades. They thus comprise a large potential electoral base, which is largely uncultivated. Although much of the literature on the topic is written from the vantage point of electoral politics, Asian American politics does not actually fit well into this paradigm. Instead, Asian American politics is multifaceted and is, moreover, complicated by a multiethnic base.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law on New Year's Day, 1970. It was a fitting beginning for a decade that produced more environmental legislation than any previous decade in American history. After 1980, environmental law became ensnarled in the partisanship of Washington. The last major environmental law was the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.