Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth. By Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 392p. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro ask an intriguing question: “Why would anyone who could see straight imagine that a tax paid by only 2 percent of the wealthiest Americans [the estate tax] could be abolished?” (p. 12). But legislation in 2001 did just that, at least temporarily. (If Congress does not act again, however, the estate tax, scheduled to expire in 2010, will revive in 2011.)

Redistricting in the New Millenium. Edited by Peter F. Galderisi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 368p. $90.00 cloth.

Gatekeepers to the Franchise: Shaping Election Administration in New York. By Ronald Hayduk. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. 282p. $35.00.

“The first instinct of power is the retention of power.” The words are Justice Antonin Scalia's, but the core insight is one long acknowledged by commentators and advocates across the ideological spectrum. These two books examine the manifestations of this instinct, one on the drawing of district lines and the other on the running of elections. If neither book furnishes a definitive answer to the question of how power's first instinct can be harnessed to promote a better democracy, that is mainly a function of the intransigence and complexity of the problems they so successfully illuminate.

Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy. Edited by Paul A. Rahe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 388p. $75.00.

This collection of original essays by a distinguished team of political theorists and historians may well be, as John McCormick proclaims on the book's dust jacket, “the best and most accessible source for the ‘Straussian’ perspective on Machiavelli's influence over modern political thought.” But unfortunately, no explicit effort is made in Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (hereafter MLRL) to review the fundamental principles of Leo Strauss's hermeneutical strategy or even his basic “thoughts on Machiavelli.” Indeed, Strauss's name is only mentioned once (p. lvi) in passing in the text, and his perspective, while it fundamentally guides the plot of the book, is so muted, so submerged, so “esoteric” that one needs to be something of a Straussian to detect it.

Which Rights Should Be Universal? By William J. Talbott. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 232p. $35.00.

A thousand words cannot begin to state a thousand disagreements, or even to summarize the wealth of subtle arguments that provoked them, and so you will just have to read this engaging and audacious book for yourself.

The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design. By Andrew Rehfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 280p. $75.00.

Most democratic theorists do not spend much time defining, let alone discussing, the concept of constituency. They assume that what is crucial to democratic institutions is the manner in which votes are distributed (equally and justly), not how democratic institutions define and draw electoral constituencies. Andrew Rehfeld's insightful and important book challenges these assumptions. For Rehfeld, democratic theorists need to think about constituency because constituencies are “the quintessential institution of official exclusion”: How democratic institutions define constituencies determines whose interests are catered to and whose interests are ignored.

Speak No Evil: The Triumph of Hate Speech Regulation. By Jon B. Gould. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 241p. $19.00.

Beginning in the later 1980s, universities and colleges across the land adopted speech codes prohibiting expression that disparages individuals or groups based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. Because freedom of speech is central to the historic mission of higher education, the new “progressive” form of censorship encountered resistance, especially when it began to be misapplied to viewpoints that merely transgressed from reigning campus orthodoxies.

Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age. By Matthew A. Baum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344p. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Most research aimed at understanding television's influence on citizens' knowledge and attention to current events has focused on network news. Yet hard news constitutes only a small fraction of TV programming. The television day is filled with shows that come under the rubric of “soft news”—running the gamut from celebrity gossip to late-night comedy, afternoon talk shows, and prime-time magazines. Matthew Baum's book fills an important gap in political communication research. Baum asks what people learn about hard news from soft news programs. He argues that watching soft news programs gets people who would otherwise have little interest in foreign affairs to pay attention to international crises.

Prophetic Politics: Christian Social Movements and American Democracy. By David S. Gutterman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 236p. $34.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Are religion and democracy hopelessly incompatible forces in our time? David Gutterman would like us to believe that they are not. In this book, he examines both recent historical and contemporary examples to show how religion can either thwart or support democratic politics, depending upon how it is practiced. He looks at four Christian “social movements”: the revivalism of Billy Sunday in the early twentieth century, the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid–twentieth century, and the Promise Keepers movement and Jim Wallis's Call to Renewal in our own time. Gutterman shows that whereas the movements of Billy Sunday and the Promise Keepers are essentially antidemocratic (and also “antipolitical”) in nature, the examples of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Call to Renewal demonstrate that religious social movements can enhance pluralism, mutual respect, and dialogue in American politics.

Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communications Networks. By Robert Huckfeldt, Paul E. Johnson, and John Sprague. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 272p. $70.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

The political science world today is filled with “must-read” books, and so it is with trepidation that I seek to add another tome to the list. Nonetheless, this new study by Robert Huckfeldt, Paul Johnson, and John Sprague addresses an important problem and does so with such innovative and well-executed theory and data that I have no doubt whatsoever that the book deserves such recognition; indeed, it should is a must-read for all social scientists interested in how democracies can be sustained. This is a bold claim, so let me explain.

Democracy Past and Future. By Pierre Rosanvallon. Edited by Samuel Moyn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 312p. $40.00.

One of France's leading political theorists and historians, Pierre Rosanvallon played a key role in what came to be known as the Second Left, and has spent most of his distinguished academic career rethinking the history of democracy in France. Under the guidance of Claude Lefort and François Furet, Rosanvallon learned to transcend intellectual fashions, reviving interest in a study of “the political” that moves beyond the mere functioning of politics.

Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court. By Thomas H. Hammond, Chris W. Bonneau, and Reginald S. Sheehan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 299p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This book will almost certainly be a “must read” in classes on judicial politics and in seminars on American political institutions. The authors intentionally developed a very simple model, and so the book is accessible to, and appropriate for, undergraduates as well as graduate students without much formal-theoretic training. Despite the model's simplicity, the substantive topics that the authors engage with the model make it useful for graduate seminars, if only as a jumping-off point for motivating empirical tests or as a foil for the development of more sophisticated models.

Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making. Edited by Ronald D. Brunner, Toddi A. Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina M. Cromley, Christine M. Edwards, and Donna W. Tucker. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 368p. $79.50 cloth, $29.50 paper.

Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management. Edited by Paul A. Sabatier, Will Focht, Mark Lubell, Zev Trachtenberg, Arnold Vedlitz, and Marty Matlock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 327p. $65.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

For almost two decades, alternative or environmental dispute resolution (EDR) has been a hot topic for many scholars and practitioners of environmental and natural resources policy and administration. There are now many books and articles that examine the promises and pitfalls of ERD. For the uninitiated, EDR can include any type of conflict or dispute resolution that falls outside of the normal state or federal judicial or bureaucratic system. This can include everything from negotiation, mediation, and arbitration (commonly used in the legal system—and not typically thought of as EDR) to things with names like collaborative, cooperative, or collective management and adaptive governance. The normally cited perquisites for ERD are that the negotiations be voluntary, that the parties participate in the process directly, that participants may withdraw from the process at any time, that third-party facilitators have no formal authority to impose a decision, and that the parties agree to whatever is decided. If this sounds like getting people together to talk and work things out, that is because this is what it is.

Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability. By R. Douglas Arnold. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 296p. $52.50 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The relationship between members of Congress and local media outlets has long been understudied by political scientists. This failure to fully explore one of the critical links between citizens and their representatives has left us with an incomplete understanding of how, or even whether, the local news media facilitate representation and accountability. R. Douglas Arnold's new book takes a significant step toward addressing this gap with an ambitious and rich study of the local news media's role in providing (or not providing) the information necessary for citizens to hold their elected officials accountable. While Arnold notes that citizens may receive information about their House members from various sources, he argues that local newspapers are unique among these information providers because, ideally, they act as independent monitors as well as forums for the airing of diverse opinions. Ultimately, however, he finds that many newspapers fall far short of this ideal by failing to produce adequate congressional coverage.

Apprehending Politics: News Media and Individual Political Development. By Marco Calavita. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 285p. $81.50 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Marco Calavita conducted extensive interviews with 15 “Generation X” Americans in order to understand their political ideas and how contextual factors (particularly the news media) influenced these thoughts, feelings, and actions. He wisely prefers the term “individual political development” (p. 6) to “political socialization” because he finds it truer to the complex, dynamic, lifelong experience. He is particularly interested in exploring the role that the news media play in attitude formation, stability, and change.

The Greening of Pentagon Brownfields: Using Environmental Discourse to Redevelop Former Military Bases. By Kenneth N. Hansen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 164p. $60.00.

In this book, Kenneth Hansen has produced an interesting assessment of how states and localities have increased their institutional capacities to deal with the unanticipated consequences of federal downsizing and pollution at military bases in the 1990s. Hansen uses survey data from 44 of the 115 military installations that were recommended for closure or realignment by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) between 1988 and 1995, as well as several case studies of military bases, to support his core proposition—that environmental factors are among the key intervening variables in the base redevelopment process. The topics discussed are especially timely, given the highly publicized and contentious battle over base closings this past year.

The Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital, and American Life. By Sharon E. Jarvis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 304p. $80.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

How did the term “liberal” become a dirty word in American politics? Why are Democrats “accused” of being liberal as a campaign tactic? These types of questions motivate Sharon Jarvis's book. The language of politics, especially partisan politics, is a topic visited by political scientists and other social scientists with modest frequency, but Jarvis offers a different, and fresh, perspective that bridges public opinion approaches with rhetorical analysis. This method should prove appealing to a variety of social scientists and students and illuminate new ways of studying political language.

Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of Human Genomics. By Ira H. Carmen. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 324p. $35.

This book is sure to spark debate among readers. It will also prove to be tough sledding for many biologists and political scientists alike. Political scientists will be challenged by the author's understanding of the language, logic, and findings of genetics and the human genomics (his detailed analysis of techniques of genetic analysis, for instance, will be alien to many political scientists). Biologists will be hard-pressed at times to get a handle on the political side of the book (e.g., throwaway references to “strict scrutiny” may be obscure to biologists not familiar with American constitutional doctrine). Thus, a number of readers may well find it frustrating to launch into this book. The author himself acknowledges this when he says (p. xii): “The study may be hard going for some political scientists. It will also probably be hard going for genomicists. They are as ignorant of political science as political scientists are ignorant of them.”

Power, Knowledge, and Politics: Policy Analysis in the States. By John A. Hird. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 256p. $49.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

This is a book that needed to be written. It is the first systematic study of U. S. nonpartisan state-legislative policy research organizations. John Hird describes these policy institutions that inform policymakers in the 50 states, probes the uses of policy research in political decisions, and examines their relationship to the political culture of which they are a part. The inquiry makes a significant contribution to what is already known about state-level policy analysis and decision making. It fills a gap in the literature for those considering the relationship between the information needs of legislators and the policy research provided to them. The focus is on knowledge utilization at the institutional level in general, rather than with specific reports on issues.

The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems. By Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 304p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

This book is about policy change in the U.S. national government. Drawing on their exhaustive collection of policy data for the last three decades, Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner make a very persuasive argument for their “punctuated equilibrium” theory of public policy. The authors detail a catalog of reasons why policy changes are typically small, including (among other things) individual-level “bounded rationality” and institutional properties like “friction.” These many factors combine to produce policy that appears to change incrementally most of the time, but there are infrequent moments in which major change is observed. The amount of nonincremental change is linked to the nature of political institutions and to the stages of the policy process. The final stage of the process—legislative change—is costly and slow, producing infrequent change, while changes in the earlier stages are less costly and therefore more frequent.

Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work. By Ted Brader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 280p. $60.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

This book examines the effects of emotions aroused by televised ads in political campaigns. Its psychological theorizing about emotion goes beyond the now-familiar portrait of a “cold-hearted citizen” borrowed from cognitive psychology and rational choice theories. But it also goes beyond the tradition in political behavior research on party identification, candidate evaluations, online processing, and the like of treating affect simply in terms of positive or negative valence. Rather, this research takes seriously the unique features of qualitatively different emotions, building off the “affective intelligence” model of George E. Marcus and colleagues.