I start this review with a confession: I don’t usually read books. This might sound like a rather surprising thing to say by someone pursuing an academic career, but there are reasons for this. The most important one is that the most recent and valuable research in comparative politics is published in articles in peer-reviewed journals not books. The latter are published at a much slower
pace and they usually present what had already been discussed in the articles. Also, academic books published by prestigious publishing houses are extremely expensive – and particularly in comparison to salaries in the Eastern Europe and to the individual cost of zero for downloading a research article via a website of the university library.