Book reviews: Carlo Ruzza and Stefano Fella (2009) Re-inventing the Italian Right: Territorial Politics, Populism and ‘Post-Fascism’. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. $115.00 (hbk), xxi + 272 pp. ISBN 9780415344616

across time and space. Nevertheless, some predictor variables that were present in the models of presidential and congressional vote choice were missing from the Canadian models. These included measures of religious affiliation and visible minority status. In his analysis of the electoral success of the Liberal Party, Blais (2005) has argued that it stems in large part from the strong support of Catholics and Canadians of nonEuropean origin. Examining whether this connection still holds up under the test of rival models would be important, particularly since the Conservatives have directed their mobilization efforts to visible minority communities, as part of their attempt to displace the Liberals as the ‘natural governing party’. A more significant weakness lies in the book’s failure to fully exploit its unique and welcome comparative design. An opportunity was missed to use the final chapter to reflect on why the valence politics models were dominant in countries with very different constitutional arrangements, electoral processes, party systems and media environments. Similarly, the final chapter would have been enriched by conjecture on the reasons for cross-national differences in the relative impact of the issue proximity model. The authors’ guarded optimism that turnout rates, like party and candidate choice, can also change, was also weakly supported. Most of these flaws do not undermine the authors’ fundamental conclusions, and do not detract from the powerful insights their work offers into the motivations of citizens.