Women's Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe. Edited by Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 400p. $85.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

It was something of a truism that within the political institutions of the Soviet bloc states, women and power were found in inverse proportion to each other. While women occupied roughly 30% of the seats within the faux-parliamentary bodies of the communist region, true power was never located in those institutions. Instead, political power was found at the Communist Party's zenith, where women were seen rarely, if at all.

The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe.

The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development. By Isabela Mares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 342p. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Since the 1970s, the power resources model has been the dominant approach to comparative studies of welfare state development. The strength of labor unions and left-wing political parties has been used to explain cross-national variation in both the structure and substance of modern social policies. However, in recent years, a number of scholars have challenged this labor-centered perspective by questioning the notion that capitalists uniformly oppose social insurance or that passage of meaningful reforms can only occur when business interests are politically marginalized.

Global Environmentalism and Local Politics: Transnational Advocacy Networks in Brazil, Ecuador, and India. By Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 195p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book brings a new angle to the study of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) by making local choices, priorities, and outcomes the central focus of its analysis. TANs link actors at local, national, and international levels in campaigns across national boundaries. As Maria Guadalupe Moag Rodrigues points out, most such studies have focused on the campaigns' impacts on governmental policies or on public opinion. Her focus is on a network's influence on a part of itself instead. Are local participants empowered by TANs to formulate their own autonomous conceptions of sustainable development and to gain institutionalized mechanisms to articulate those? To answer these questions, a focus on the internal dynamics of politics, resources, cohesion, and legitimacy in the network becomes central. This is not a wholly new approach and is actually quite common in other fields, but does represent a departure from many studies of similar phenomena in political science. Rodrigues argues that it is especially important to look at the impact on local network members because that is central for local outcomes.

Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. By Juan Diez Medrano. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344p. $39.95.

During the 1990s, a number of scholarly books and articles appeared in both Europe and North America to help explain the preferences and motivations of European mass publics concerning the European integration process. These scholarly efforts were spawned in large part by the vast amount of survey data generated by the Commission of the European Union in its efforts to monitor public opinion on issues pertaining to the European Union.

Eastern European Capitalism in the Making.

Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World.

The Futures of European Capitalism. By Vivien A. Schmidt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 376p. $18.95.

This is a multilevel book that deals with a multilayered topic. It operates on three levels, the national, the European, and the global, and has three distinct (albeit related) objectives. The first objective is to chart the courses that the three main types of European capitalism (liberal, state, and managed) have taken since the 1970s, and then to detail the pressures that have pushed these “national capitalisms” along these different paths. The second objective is to bring the European Union back into discussions of the European political economy. This may seem a surprising objective given the vast amount of ink spilled on the EU in general, but Vivien Schmidt attempts to disaggregate the effects of “Europeanization” from those of “Globalization” and thus give a more nuanced account of the pressures facing European states. The third objective is to “bring discourse back in,” thereby giving greater analytic specificity to our understandings of institutional change and economic adjustment. This is a big and bold book.

Defining Russian Federalism. By Elizabeth Pascal. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 224p. $74.95.

The rise of Russia's regions became one of the big stories that followed the collapse of Soviet communism. After decades of submission in a highly centralized and authoritarian system, resurgent regions emerged as autonomous actors, threatening the territorial integrity and political stability of the newly independent Russian state. With the notable exception of Chechnya, Russia's regions eventually were reintegrated with the center, but on the basis of an asymmetrical federal system. Elizabeth Pascal's book examines the process that led to this uneven territorial distribution of power in post-Soviet Russia.

The Strategic Use of Referendums: Power, Legitimacy, and Democracy. By Mark Clarence Walker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 166p. $49.95.

This book portrays the referendum as a consequence of elite bargaining. Mark Walker describes this electoral device as one that arises from an executive–legislative struggle where competing groups attempt to gain political legitimacy from the masses, even in nondemocratic states. Political elites thus use the referendum to settle disputes that appear irresolvable in the traditional chambers of the power, or, as E. E. Schattschneider indicated in The Semi-Sovereign People (1960), to expand the scope of the conflict to enhance one's political advantage. The referendum process is thus subject to manipulation—by the choice of wording, the timing of the vote, the subject matter, and even the interpretation of the results.

Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada. By Stuart N. Soroka. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002. 168p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

The literature on agenda setting has gathered momentum in recent years by tapping into garbage-can models, exploring the dynamics of policy subsystems and decision making, and relying on increasingly sophisticated empirical techniques. Stuart Soroka makes two important contributions with this book: First, he develops an integrating framework for the sprawling literature on agenda setting, and second, he attempts to measure and test hypotheses on agenda-setting dynamics in a parliamentary and federal political system.

Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America.

Comrades No More: The Seeds of Change in Eastern Europe.

Dismantling Democratic States. By Ezra Suleiman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 368p. $39.50.

Market-driven administrative reform has been the leitmotif of profound, perhaps even unprecedented, public sector reform across the Western world for the past decade or so. It is indicative that even in Sweden (the place of writing), a country that has been fairly slow in adopting this model of administrative reform, authorities such as the Migration Board and the Prison and Probation Board nowadays define their clients as “customers.”

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. By Charles Tilly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

Charles Tilly's study of democracy and contention is itself highly contentious and deservedly so. After reading and writing social and political history for over five decades, its author is well positioned to judge which social scientific understandings of democracy hold up to historical scrutiny and which do not. In his search for the “mechanisms and processes that promote, inhibit or reverse democratization” (p. ix), Tilly identifies a number of false leads. One of his most contentious points is that the quest for democracy's “necessary and sufficient conditions” is futile (p. 39). Democracy, he insists, “does not have a single history … repeated in more or less the same conditions and sequences by each democratizing country” (p. 35). Searching for either uniform conditions or repeated sequences is, thus, a waste of time. In an equally contentious mode, he cautions “culturalists, phenomenologists, behaviorists and methodological individualists” not to “treat individual dispositions as the fundamental causes of social processes.” Democratization and de-democratization cannot be understood through the “reconstruction” and “aggregation” of individual dispositions just before their point of action (p. xi). Nor, he argues, can democratization be understood as a “product of age-old character traits or of short-term constitutional innovations” (p. 9).