Book Reviews | Elections, Contestation, and Democracy which to press their agenda, but he also argues, contra the claims of an emerging global civil society, that most of these agendas are still centered on national goals and authorities. Here, he particularly emphasizes the role of “rooted cosmopolitans” as intermediaries between the local and the global, referring to people who may have diverse connections and loyalties but “continue to be linked to place, to the social networks that inhabit that space, and to the resources, experiences and opportunities that place provides them” (Strangers at the Gates, p. 185). One key criticism of the original political process model that Tarrow does little to address, and indeed may aggravate further, is that it is too broad and imprecise, that it explains too much and therefore may not explain anything specifically. This criticism in its strong form is probably unfair. As he makes clear, the political-process model “is best seen not as a theory, but as a framework in which to examine the dynamics of contention” (Power in Movement, p. 28), and as such it has been unusually rich and productive. Yet one cannot help wondering what the boundaries are to “contentious collective action” if it encompasses such diverse events as petition drives, sit-ins, mass demonstrations, the tea party, the bombing of a government building in Oklahoma, and the French Revolution. In addition, as Tarrow himself acknowledges at one point, one can legitimately ask whether or not adding more processes and mechanisms to an already elaborate framework significantly enhances our understanding of social movements or simply weighs us down. This last problem is particularly evident in the new edition of Power in Movement, where enormous amounts of new information, research, and thinking are grafted onto the original three-part structure. The book clearly provides a thorough, judicious account of contemporary thinking on contentious politics, but it also reminds one just a little of the Ptolemaic models of the universe, which became increasingly complex and contorted as they tried to assimilate more and more new information. Of course, social movements are not self-contained orbs following neatly prescribed orbits, and there is no reason to believe that the core assumptions of the political-process model are faulty in any significant way. Yet the result can be confusing. For example, Tarrow’s conclusion in this book expresses alarm over the increased violence associated with contentious politics in recent years, but there is little elsewhere that should give us cause for such alarm. Strangers at the Gates covers much the same ground, but is a more congenial companion. In this book, Tarrow revises and republishes a selection of articles—nearly all of them since 1994—that mark some of the key conceptual moments leading up to his new synthesis: the interaction of social movements with other elements of the polity, the increased appreciation for contingency and process, the nod toward constructivism, and, most importantly, the analysis of transnational activism. In this book, though, 918 Perspectives on Politics the arguments are lengthier, more grounded in empirical detail, and organized so that their significance to the larger arguments are made apparent. As a result, the reader has a better understanding of the reasons Tarrow has made the choices he has. In sum, these books should be required reading for all serious students of social movements and contentious politics. If one has only limited time and only a tangential interest in the topic—say, for an advanced undergraduate seminar—the new edition of Power in Movement should suffice. For the graduate student or more advanced scholar seeking to make contentious politics a focus of his or her research, (re)reading the first edition of Power in Movement along with Strangers at the Gates might be a more rewarding strategy. But regardless of how one engages the work, it is work that must be engaged. Policing Democracy: Overcoming Obstacles to Citizen Security in Latin America. By Mark Ungar. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 416p. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. doi:10.1017/S1537592713001370 — José Miguel Cruz, Florida International University In recent years, many Latin American cities have had the dubious honor of being labeled the “murder capital of the world.” Cities such as Caracas in Venezuela, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, and others have taken turns being branded the most violent city in the world, above conflict-ridden cities in the Middle East or Africa. However, it is a paradox that these cities, with extremely high rates of homicide and criminal violence, have also undergone ambitious and sweeping institutional reforms in their police and criminal justice apparatuses during the last two decades. In many cases, these reforms have been implemented as part of a democratic overhaul. The stated aim of Mark Ungar’s book is to explain how Latin American countries have carried out citizen security reforms, precisely during a period characterized by a spectacular rise in crime, the expansion of criminal organizations, and political efforts to secure democratic rule. For an informed reader, the most relevant question beyond the book’s objective might be why these reforms, oriented to revamp law enforcement institutions in Latin America, have largely failed to bring more security to citizens across the region in a period when most countries can be considered under democratic governance. Policing Democracy is a project to develop a comparative analytical framework to explain why reforms of criminal justice institutions face so many hurdles and setbacks, and how they can be overcome in the context of the democratic rule of law. In developing such a framework, Ungar identifies five issues that reforms have addressed in the region: structural organization, professional support for the police, control mechanisms, legal changes, and community policing. For each of these topics, he examines three areas. First is institutional relations: how law enforcement institutions establish relations that advance or curtail the reforms; second, daily policing: how criminal justice officials experience their jobs in the context of the reforms; and finally, what the author calls the “spectrum of reform”: a comprehensive analysis of the actors, conditions, and dynamics that shape the process of reform. At the core of the book lies the argument—or rather, a series of arguments—that reforms in law enforcement institutions should be directed toward problem-oriented policing, away from the traditional practice-oriented approach to policing, which constituted the backbone of law enforcement procedures during authoritarian eras. Legacies of such traditional approaches have blended with posttransition moral panic over violence to bring on an era of mano dura policies, with catastrophic results for many Latin American countries. Conversely, Ungar views problem-oriented policing not only as a key to solving the crisis of security but also as instrumental to building democratic legitimacy and governance in the region. Most of the analytical framework is laid out in Chapters 2 and 3, but the latter provides an interesting examination of the impact of insecurity on governance, especially in terms of the relationships between police institutions and society. In doing this, Ungar joins an increasing chorus of scholars who, in the burst of violent crime in Latin America, see insecurity as a major threat to democracy. However, he goes beyond most of the prevalent scholarship when, instead of focusing exclusively on crime and violence rates, he ponders the effects of performance and policies advanced by police institutions to tackle the crisis of security. For Ungar, since “democracy requires a rule of law that contemporary states are not strong enough to sustain,” reforming police institutions constitutes a crucial enterprise to safeguard democratic rule under the assault of violent crime (p. 18). Chapters 4 through 7 present case-study analyses of three countries (Honduras, Bolivia, and Argentina) in which police reforms have been implemented with varied results, although none can be considered an entirely successful story, and the author himself is reluctant to single out any country as an overall success. Rather, and this is one of the assets of the book, he delves into the structure of police institutions, their dynamics on the ground, obstacles to reforming them, and thoughtful assessments of ways to deal with such obstacles. A great deal of the richness and breadth of the book comes from this thorough approach as it illustrates the complexities and limitations of well-intended but always politically fragile processes of reform. This approach separates Policing Democracy from other previous volumes about citizen security reform in Latin America. It also allows the author to present a comparative perspective within some of the countries studied, particularly Argentina, where its decentralized institutions rendered mixed results in a national context. It is the effort to build a road map to overcome obstacles to police reform that makes Ungar’s research especially valuable, however. He provides a set of strategic approaches that stakeholders can utilize to tackle the pitfalls described throughout the text. They include the identification of points of tension during the reforms, the consideration of the discretionary power of police officials, the improvement of information-based evaluation systems, the incorporation of structures for citizen engagement in reform processes, and the attention to internal management of security bodies. With these prescriptions, the book appeals to practitioners, policymakers, and administrators of criminal justice reforms, not only in Latin America but also in other developing areas of the world. While the book is a significant contribution to the debate over the importance of citizen security institutions in democratizing countries, it is hard to share Ungar’s confidence on local and decentralized approaches to revamping citizen security institutions without taking into account the importance of power relations within the state. Although the author recognizes that decentralization of citizen security has its limitations and tries to address them by proposing what he calls “Structured Citizen Engagement” (p. 313), he builds his strategy for reform around local management of security and citizen participation. This bottom-up approach sounds sensible, but, as the book largely documents, it also has unexpectedly brought important support for counterreform initiatives. Ungar addresses these setbacks by proposing a number of measures that are more administrative than political, more bureaucratic than encompassing. Here lies a critical shortcoming of the book. His commitment to unscrambling all the elements of citizen security reforms pushes him away from looking at the big picture, namely, the relations between elites and security operatives acting on behalf of the state. In other words, the book falls short of considering the political conditions that determine power relations and that create the institutions and mechanisms of citizen security. Because the author resists comparisons between successful and failed stories of reform, we are unable to distinguish the key political variables leading to effective and democratic citizen security institutions. Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras have different levels of crime, but they were not selected on the basis of the varying achievements of their security reforms; rather, they were selected for their diverse socioeconomic conditions. Hence, other than identifying good practices at the local level, the book does not offer an analysis of the ways in which comprehensive reforms advance citizen security at the national level. Democratic rule in Latin America has certainly changed relations between the public and elected officials, but politicians, elites, and security operatives September 2013 | Vol. 11/No. 3 919 Book Reviews | Elections, Contestation, and Democracy have also learned how to use these new interactions to perpetuate their power and systems of authoritarian domination, frequently against the goal of reforms. Ungar neglects that discussion in favor of a more recipe-like approach that frequently gets extra space in the book by describing the micromanagement of reforms. In the end, in Policing Democracy, one can find all the specific and numerous issues that thwart ambitious citizen security reforms—and that is a significant contribution in itself—but we are still lacking the ultimate answer as to why most reforms have failed to bring security to Latin Americans. The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans’ Right to Vote. By Tova Andrea Wang. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. 200p. $24.95. doi:10.1017/S1537592713001394 — Keith Gunnar Bentele, University of Massachusetts Boston In this extremely timely book, Tova Wang provides a detailed overview of partisan voter-suppression efforts from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the dramatic increase in restrictive voter requirements implemented or considered in 2011–12. Along the way, Wang argues that as a general rule, election procedures and reforms should encourage and increase voter participation as long as such practices do not undermine other values, such as election integrity. She presents this “principle of voter inclusion” as a useful guide for evaluating contemporary and historical election reforms and as “a means of restoring the concept of voting as a right” (p. 14). Written in an accessible style for a broad audience, this book provides a number of valuable contributions to the ongoing debate about election reform. The broad historical perspective in this book highlights the ways in which suppression efforts have been adapted to accommodate new legal and demographic realities over the years, but also details an incredible number of uncannily direct historical parallels to recent partisan legislative and administrative efforts at disenfranchisement. These parallels hold true for both the specific content of restrictive reform efforts and the rhetoric used to justify and defend such reforms. To take just two examples from the late 1800s, Wang discusses the introduction of proof-ofcitizenship requirements by Republicans in many states, argued to be necessary to combat voter fraud, and the purging of Republican voters from registration lists by Democratic officials in Florida (a truly historical irony in light of the Florida registration purges in the 2000s). A recurrent theme is that the threat of voter fraud has nearly always been a primary justification for the necessity of these restrictive policies and practices. The author is careful to stress that contemporary concerns about voter fraud, especially in-person voter impersonation, are largely unfounded, but additionally reports that historical research 920 Perspectives on Politics suggests that even in earlier periods in which election fraud was significantly more common, accusations of fraud were consistently exaggerated by partisans to a great degree. Wang begins by documenting the multifaceted approaches to voter suppression engaged in by both Republicans and Democrats, but especially southern Democrats, in the century preceding the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She appropriately takes a wide view on suppression efforts, ranging from onerous registration requirements, literacy tests, and poll taxes to felon disenfranchisement and disinformation. Following the passage of both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, the resulting political realignment of the South led Republicans to adopt racially discriminatory suppression strategies similar to those that had been central to the longstanding Democratic domination of the South. While southern Democrats continued to engage in some forms of discriminatory suppression in the 1960 and 1970s, Wang argues that since the 1960s, the Republican Party has been the primary force behind practices and policies intended to disenfranchise or reduce turnout among its political opponents. The author details the increasing sophistication, and nationwide coordination, of Republican voter caging efforts, the origins of which she traces to the 1964 election. She also focuses on two pieces of reform legislation, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, the “motor voter” law) and the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), both of which illustrate the manner in which well-intentioned reforms can be implemented in the service of partisan interests. In the case of the NVRA, Republican politicians attacked the bill as an invitation to fraud. After its passage, seven states, all with Republican governors, initially refused to implement the law. In the years following passage, more Republicans than Democrats were registered through the NVRA, likely due to the fact that as increasing numbers of voters were registering at Motor Vehicle Departments, the section of the law requiring registration opportunities at public assistance agencies was neglected and unenforced. Similarly, Wang details the manner in which HAVA, drafted in the wake of the 2000 election debacle, was shaped by congressional Republicans to address voter fraud, which was not a significant issue within the highly problematic 2000 election. In addition, some provisions of the law were subsequently used to disenfranchise voters, contrary to the overall intent of the legislation. A weak version of an ID requirement contained in HAVA has led to the passage of significantly more stringent ID requirements in a majority of states. These bills have been supported by Republicans and have passed nearly universally along partisan lines. The passage of these bills increased dramatically following the 2010 election, supported by newly elected Republican majorities and supermajorities. Further, a provision of HAVA required that voters not