The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm . By Susan D. Hyde. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 248p. $35.00.

ever. I found two aspects of Global Warming Gridlock problematic. First, Victor’s explanation for the failure of multilateral climate diplomacy is not particularly convincing. He claims that multilateral diplomacy has gone awry because diplomats “thought global warming was just another environmental problem, but the standard tools of environmental diplomacy don’t work well on problems, such as global warming, that require truly independent coordination” (p. 203). In contrast to Victor’s realistic analysis of the nature of the global warming problem, this explanation seems quite naive. What about the political power of interest groups that stand to lose from climate policy, such as coal producers? What about the role of the Senate filibuster in killing countless climate policies in the United States? What about the deep distributional conflict between industrialized and emerging countries? What about fundamental disagreements concerning burden sharing? To this reviewer, these factors seem much more fundamental to an understanding of the global warming gridlock than the nostalgia of environmental diplomats. Second, given Victor’s emphasis on credibility, it is ironic that his policy proposals are themselves somewhat vague. What exactly are countries such as China and the United States supposed to promise? For example, it seems difficult to believe that the domestic politics of the United States would allow a large income transfer to China in exchange for reduced use of coal. Similarly, it seems hard to believe that the European Union’s promise to reduce emissions or deploy renewable energy would fundamentally change China’s political-economic calculus or reduce opposition to climate policy among conservatives in the United States. I may well be wrong here, but Victor’s book does little to convince me. Climate Governance at the Crossroads also suffers from two problems worth mentioning here. First, Hoffmann does not measure the extent to which policymakers are actually learning from climate experiments. Although these climate experiments seem to produce information and the author’s interviews confirm this expectation, for a social scientist this is not enough. Hoffmann’s book falls short of a rigorous demonstration that climate experiments are actually causing meaningful learning. Second, while Hoffmann’s analysis is strong on the descriptive side, it does not even attempt to develop a theoretical account to explain climate experiments. He never reaches beyond the rather obvious claim that if multilateral negotiations are failing, then interested actors have incentives to act. This is unfortunate because the causes of climate experimentation are central to an evaluation of their effectiveness. If climate experiments are implemented by actors who are fundamentally different from the rest of the world, then it is not at all clear that climate experiments produce useful information for the rest of the world. No amount of experimentation among a small transnational climate elite helps solve the problem unless these experiments somehow influence the behavior of outsiders. While both books suffer from weaknesses, this is not altogether surprising given the monstrous complexity of the climate change problem. Overall, both books are impressive and should be read by anyone interested in the future of planet Earth.