WILLIAM D. ADLER and ANDREW J. POLSKY contend that contrary to traditional notions of a weak national state in our nation's early years, the national state, acting through the Army, was indispensable in shaping the pattern and direction of economic development. They propose a new way of conceptualizing the early American state: a state of the periphery, dominated by the Army, and a state of the center, in which other public institutions also performed key development functions.
RICHARD R. MARCUS examines the roots of Madagascar's President Marc Ravalomanana's power and how they grew in leadership and regime expression. He argues that the private sector came to substitute for the bureaucracy, military, and other common bases of neopatrimonial rule thus allowing Ravalomanana to create a personalized economic-political fusion in a democratic context. This ultimately contributed to his downfall.
Heather Gerkenʼs The Democracy Index offers a timely book about the need to collect and analyze data to enable the evaluation of election quality. Policymakers and scholars working in election reform would be remiss not to familiarize themselves with its arguments for the development of standardized metrics of election performance. Since the 2000 election identified potential problems in our ability to count all the votes accurately, academics, activists, interest groups, and institutions of government have been grappling with how to improve the process. However, the reform process, as argued by Gerken, has been hampered by the lack of accessible and comparable data with which to evaluate the operations of elections. Moreover, there are few incentives or resources to encourage election administration entities to engage in this process.
The current war in Afghanistan shows the importance of cross-border insurgency, as the Taliban are fueled by recruits, funds, and sanctuary in Pakistan. Idean Salehyan's book offers a well-designed and clearly executed study of a pressing topic. Salehyan argues that "transnational rebels" (TNRs) pose a unique set of challenges, making civil conflict more likely and enduring, while also contributing to international conflict.
The book's title pays homage to the important concept advanced by Jackson- Beeck and Meadow that there are three agendas involved in debates: those of candidates, those of the media, and those of the public. This book is devoted to an appreciation of voters' perspectives on debates. It offers new data and a perspective (qualitative) on presidential debates that differs from most work in this area. Although some data in the book are from survey research, the heart of this enterprise consists of analysis of quotations from focus groups. Different kinds of data offer different advantages; the strengths of this form of data are seeing things from the participants' (that is, voters') perspective and greater depth of understanding (the corresponding limitation, of course, is that qualitative data are not optimal for supporting generalizations about populations). It is important that we have a variety of forms of data for informing our understanding of presidential debates.
Colin Powell had a remarkable career of public service, serving ten Presidents, beginning with his commission into the Army in 1958 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. His career as a senior official is most noteworthy: “ Of the seven seats on the National Security Council (NSC) he has held three ” (p. 2). This career provided him with an unparalleled level of intimacy with the recent history of U.S. military intervention. “ In one capacity or another, Powell was involved in almost all major American military engagements over the past four decades ” (p. 197).
STEPHEN BENEDICT DYSON discusses the impact of George W. Bush's personality and belief system on the decision to surge troops in Iraq. He argues that absent Bush's distinctive approach to leadership, the surge decision would not have been made.
RAÚL L. MADRID argues that liberal left parties in Latin America arose prior to the debt crisis of the 1980s and were profoundly shaped by the failure of state interventionist policies and the initial success of market-oriented reforms. The interventionist left parties, by contrast, typically emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the economies of the region had encountered problems and the support for market-oriented policies had diminished.
BRIAN J. GLENN explores how conservatism has impacted the growth of the American state since the New Deal and also how the growth of the American state has influenced conservatism. He finds that in many instances, conservatives have moved beyond mere obstructionism and that a new form of modern conservatism has conceded the goals of liberalism.
LOREE BYKERK and ARDITH MANEY look at how consumer protection policy fared under the conservative congresses of recent decades. They argue that although the congressional forum open to consumer protection issues remained stable, consumer advocates and their allies were significantly more outnumbered by producer interests than they were before the Republican takeover of the House in 1995.