Green States and Social Movements: Environmentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Norway.

Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa. By Evan S. Lieberman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 344p. $75.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

Evan Lieberman has produced a first-rate work of comparative political economy. Just as importantly, he has done so by going boldly (and engagingly) where so few have gone before—into the tax state. Given how critical the capacity of a state to tax economic elites is to the provision of public goods, redistribution, and the promotion of development in general, it is indeed shocking to realize just how little attention this question has received from political scientists (there being as always some notable exceptions). Lieberman sets out to correct this gap not only by carefully and meticulously defining and measuring different tax states but also by providing a rich historical and comparative account of the rise and consolidation of the two very different tax states of South Africa and Brazil.

The Wheel of Law: India's Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context. By Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344p. $39.50.

Since its birth in 1947, India has presented an enigma to many social scientists. A country with a huge population—many living in rather grim circumstances of illiteracy, poverty and despair, bearing a historical legacy of hegemonic rule under the Mughals or the British, and professing a traditional culture marked by deference to authority and hierarchic social arrangements—does not present ideal conditions for democracy to flourish. But India confounded many pundits simply by surviving, indeed succeeding, as a pluralist and constitutional polity. However, one development that may be undermining that confidence is the emergence of an aggressive religious movement coalescing around the sangh parivar (i.e., the cluster of organizations dedicated to the principles of Hindutva), the extremist Hindu identity movement whose electoral success and social agenda is threatening to unravel one of the cherished pillars of India's democracy—its self-conscious and determined commitment to a secular order. Gary Jacobsohn's book explores the challenges this development poses from within a jurisprudential and comparative perspective, including in his analysis references and themes relevant to Israel and the United States as well.

Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages. By Debra Javeline. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 312p. $60.00.

Why, in the face of massive delays in the payment of wages throughout the Russian Federation during the 1990s, did so few Russian workers engage in organized protest? This empirical puzzle has important implications not only for understanding how the fragile post-Soviet regime managed to endure more than a decade of severe socioeconomic crisis, but also for general theories of social mobilization. In her highly original and thought-provoking book, Debra Javeline argues that the relative quiescence of Russian workers can be explained parsimoniously: In the face of the complexities of post-Soviet political and economic transition, workers could not collectively decide who was to blame for wage arrears, and hence could not organize effective protests against any particular individual or institution.

Politicians and Economic Reform in New Democracies: Argentina and the Philippines in the 1990s.

Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. By Juan J. López. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 272p. $42.50.

When the Berlin wall came down, many Cuban-Americans eagerly anticipated the imminent fall of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. “Next Christmas in Havana,” read the bumper stickers in Miami. But most scholars studying Cuba doubted that Castro would be so easily dislodged. They cited manifest differences between Cuban and European communism: Cuba had an authentic revolution that began with broad support, whereas communism arrived in most of Eastern Europe in the rucksack of the Red Army. Cuban nationalism bolstered the legitimacy of a government in conflict with the United States, whereas European nationalism corroded the legitimacy of regimes beholden to Soviet Russia. The standard of living in communist Europe paled in comparison to that of the West, whereas Cuban conditions compared favorably to much of Latin America and the Caribbean. European communist regimes were led by colorless bureaucrats who had long since lost faith in their own ideology, whereas Cuba was still led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and the generation that made the revolution.

The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence. Edited by Pauline Jones Luong. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 352p. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

The closed nature of the Soviet system meant that little was known about the republics on the periphery, particularly those of Central Asia. Most scholars viewed the region as a cotton colony of the Soviet Union dominated by a largely traditional, feudal society impervious to Western understanding. Despite greater access to the region and its peoples in the wake of the collapse of communism, the perception that the region remained under Moscow's shadow continued to suppress interest among nonspecialists. More recently, however, renewed interest in the Muslim world brought on by the war on terror has changed all of that. Specialists in international relations, security studies, and comparative politics, in particular, are intrigued by any number of questions, not the least of which are the persistence of authoritarianism and the inability of radical Islam to gain traction in Central Asia.

German Foreign Policy: Navigating a New Era.

Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State: Path Dependence and Policy Diffusion. By Junko Kato. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 276p. $55.00.

Studies of the welfare state in democratic capitalist systems rarely explore comprehensively the political, economic, and institutional linkages between social programs and tax structure; analysts of tax policy rarely explicate systematically the political consequences of tax structure for social benefit programs. Junko Kato's new book is an engaging, albeit incomplete, effort to fill this void.

Retiring the State: The Politics of Pension Privatization in Latin America and Beyond. By Raúl Madrid. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 336p. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Since the Pinochet regime in Chile privatized its public pension system in 1981, several Latin American countries have enacted public pension reforms, usually incorporating some structural reform or privatization. Why have some countries privatized their public pensions (Chile, Mexico, Bolivia), while others add optional private pensions (Argentina, Uruguay), create parallel systems with both public and private pensions (Colombia, Peru), or fail to enact any structural reform (Brazil)? Retiring the State will be required reading for those interested in the answer to this question.

Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion.

European Integration and Political Conflict. Edited by Gary Marks and Marco R. Steenbergen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $75.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

In the study of European Union politics, it is commonplace to deplore the absence of electoral mobilization across national boundaries. One of the reasons the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, the argument goes, is that elections to the European Parliament serve as a projection screen for fundamentally domestic debates. The purpose of Gary Marks's and Marco Steenbergen's volume is to subject this common assumption to systematic empirical scrutiny. The central question the editors pose concerns what features shape the contestation over European integration. Specifically, can such contestation be captured by a small number of dimensions? And how do these dimensions relate to the domestic left/right cleavage over the role of the state in the economy?

Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 468p. $70.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Occasionally, when you have really talented graduate students, you are looking for a book that would challenge them to think deeply about their research. This is such a book. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer have put together an excellent volume that takes up some of the most challenging problems regarding questions about research design, how to think about causality in the social sciences, and how to connect questions about ontology to research methods.

New Approaches to Comparative Politics: Insights from Political Theory.

Caught in the Crossfire: Revolutions, Repression, and the Rational Peasant. By T. David Mason. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 328p. $78.00 cloth, $30.95 paper.

Among citizens and scholars in many parts of the world, concern about political violence has been intense since the United States declared a war on terror after 9/11. In this volume, T. David Mason reminds us that, tragically, insurgency was common in the last half of the twentieth century, and he explores a question that remains fundamental: Why, when rebel victory is uncertain at best and the risks large, do people rebel? He probes this question primarily with respect to peasants in Latin America, but his answers are more broadly relevant as well.