Access to credit is an important means of providing people with the opportunity to make a better life for themselves. Loans are essential for most people who want to purchase a home, start a business, pay for college, or weather a spell of unemployment. Yet many people in poor and minority communities—regardless of their creditworthiness—find credit hard to come by, making the climb out of poverty extremely difficult. How dire are the lending markets in these communities and what can be done to improve access to credit for disadvantaged groups? In Credit Markets for the Poor, editors Patrick Bolton and Howard Rosenthal and an expert team of economists, political scientists, and legal and business scholars tackle these questions with shrewd analysis and a wealth of empirical data.

Credit Markets for the Poor opens by examining what credit options are available to poor households. Economist John Caskey profiles how weak credit options force many working families into a disastrous cycle of short-term, high interest loans in order to sustain themselves between paychecks. Löic Sadoulet explores the reasons that community lending organizations, which have been so successful in developing countries, have failed in more advanced economies. He argues the obstacles that have inhibited community lending groups in industrialized countries—such as a lack of institutional credibility and the high cost of establishing lending networks—can be overcome if banks facilitate the community lending process and establish a system of repayment insurance. Credit Markets for the Poor also examines how legal institutions affect the ability of the poor to borrow. Daniela Fabbri and Mario Padula argue that well-meaning provisions making it more difficult for lenders to collect on defaulted loans are actually doing a disservice to the poor in credit markets. They find that in areas with lax legal enforcement of debt agreements, credit markets for the poor are underdeveloped because lenders are unwilling to take risks on issuing credit or will do so only at exorbitant interest rates. Timothy Bates looks at programs that facilitate small-business development and finds that they have done little to reduce poverty. He argues that subsidized business creation programs may lure inexperienced households into entrepreneurship in areas where little profitable investment is possible, hence setting them up for failure.

With clarity and insightful analysis, Credit Markets for the Poor demonstrates how weak credit markets are impeding the social and economic mobility of the needy. By detailing the many disadvantages that impoverished people face when seeking to borrow, this important new volume highlights a significant national problem and offers solutions for the future.

PATRICK BOLTON is John H. Scully ’66 Professor of Finance and professor of economics in the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University.

HOWARD ROSENTHAL is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and professor of politics at Princeton University and visiting professor in the Department of Economics at Brown University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Raisa Bahchieva, Timothy Bates, Patrick Bolton, John P. Caskey, Daniela Fabbri, Robert Kaestner, Malgosia Madajewicz, Mario Padula, Howard Rosenthal, Loic Sadoulet, Lisa J. Servon, Robert M. Townsend, Susan M. Wachter, Antwuan Wallace, and Elizabeth Warren.

Explores the mechanisms of military intervention and its consequences. The contributors examine a succession of coups, attempted coups, and established military regimes, with a view to evaluate the role of the military as a ruling group and an organization fostering political development. These studies cast strong doubt on the abilities of the military as a modernizing and stabilizing agent, raising important questions about our policies on military assistance and arms sales. Bienen makes an especially strong plea for a reassessment of our military and economic-political policies in order to determine whether both are working toward the same goals.

HENRY BIENEN is assistant professor of politics and faculty associate at the Center of International Studies, Princeton University.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Donald N. Levine, Jae Souk Sohn, Philip B. Springer, Nur Yalman, Aristide R. Zolberg.

During the 1970s, a nationwide school finance reform movement—fueled by litigation challenging the constitutionality of state education funding laws—brought significant changes to the way many states finance their public elementary and secondary school systems. School finance reform poses difficult philosophical questions: what is the meaning of equality in educational opportunity and of equity in the distribution of tax burdens? But it also involves enormous financial complexity (for example, dividing resources among competing special programs) and political risk (such as balancing local control with the need for statewide parity).

For those states (like New York) that were slow to make changes a new decade has brought new constraints and complications. Sluggish economic growth, taxpayer revolts, reductions in federal aid, all affect education revenues. And the current concern with educational excellence may obscure the needs of the poor and educationally disadvantaged.

This book will provide New York’s policy makers and other concerned specialists with a better understanding of the political, economic, and equity issues underlying the school finance reform debate. It details existing inequities, evaluates current financing formulas, and presents options for change. Most important, for all those concerned with education and public policy in New York and elsewhere, it offers a masterful assessment of the trade-offs involved in developing reform programs that balance the conflicting demands of resource equalization, political feasibility, and fiscal responsibility.

"Synthesizes the political and fiscal research [on school finance reform] and applies it to the New York Context....A blueprint for how to redesign state school finance....A fine book." —Public Administration Review

"This is a book that lucidly discusses the issues in school finance and provides valuable reference material." —American Political Science Review

The late JOEL S. BERKE was director of the Education Policy Research Institute of Educational Testing
Service.

MARGARET E. GOERTZ is policy research scientist at Educational Testing Service.

RICHARD COLEY is research associate at Educational Testing Service.

The gap between the richest and poorest Americans has grown steadily over the last thirty years, and economic inequality is on the rise in many other industrialized democracies as well. But the magnitude and pace of the increase differs dramatically across nations. A country’s political system and its institutions play a critical role in determining levels of inequality in a society. Democracy, Inequality, and Representation argues that the reverse is also true—inequality itself shapes political systems and institutions in powerful and often overlooked ways.

In Democracy, Inequality, and Representation, distinguished political scientists and economists use a set of international databases to examine the political causes and consequences of income inequality. The volume opens with an examination of how differing systems of political representation contribute to cross-national variations in levels of inequality. Torben Iverson and David Soskice calculate that taxes and income transfers help reduce the poverty rate in Sweden by over 80 percent, while the comparable figure for the United States is only 13 percent. Noting that traditional economic models fail to account for this striking discrepancy, the authors show how variations in electoral systems lead to very different outcomes.

But political causes of disparity are only one part of the equation. The contributors also examine how inequality shapes the democratic process. Pablo Beramendi and Christopher Anderson show how disparity mutes political voices: at the individual level, citizens with the lowest incomes are the least likely to vote, while high levels of inequality in a society result in diminished electoral participation overall. Thomas Cusack, Iverson, and Philipp Rehm demonstrate that uncertainty in the economy changes voters’ attitudes; the mere risk of losing one’s job generates increased popular demand for income support policies almost as much as actual unemployment does. Ronald Rogowski and Duncan McRae illustrate how changes in levels of inequality can drive reforms in political institutions themselves. Increased demand for female labor participation during World War II led to greater equality between men and women, which in turn encouraged many European countries to extend voting rights to women for the first time.

The contributors to this important new volume skillfully disentangle a series of complex relationships between economics and politics to show how inequality both shapes and is shaped by policy. Democracy, Inequality, and Representation provides deeply nuanced insight into why some democracies are able to curtail inequality—while others continue to witness a division that grows ever deeper.

PABLO BERAMENDI is assistant professor of political science at Duke University.

CHRISTOPHER J. ANDERSON is professor of government at Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Christopher J. Anderson, Pablo Beramendi, Andrea Brandolini, Thomas R. Cusack, Robert J. Franzese Jr., Jude C. Hays, Torben Iversen, Duncan C. McRae, Jonas Pontusson, Philipp Rehm, Ronald Rogowski, David Rueda, Lyle Scruggs, Timothy M. Smeeding, and David Soskice.

Over the past eight years, a marked shift in the national political mood has substantially reduced the federal government's involvement in ameliorating urban problems and enhanced the prominence of state and local governments in the domestic policy arena. Many states and big cities have been forced to reassess their traditionally vexed relationships.

Nowhere has this drama been played out more stormily than in New York. In The Two New Yorks, experts from government, the academy, and the non-profit sector examine aspects of an interaction that has a major impact on the performance of state and city institutions. The analyses presented here explore current state-city strategies for handling such troubling policy areas as education, health care, and housing. Attention is also given to important contextual factors such as economic and demographic trends, and to structural features such as the political framework, relationships with the national government, and the system of public finance.

Despite its uniquely large scope, the drama of the new New Yorks parallels or presages issues faced by virtually all large cities and their states. This unprecedented study makes a vital contribution in an era of declining federal aid and pressing urban need.

GERALD BENJAMIN is at SUNY New Paltz.

CHARLES BRECHER is at New York University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard D. Alba, Mary Jo Bane, Gerald Benjamin, Robert Berne, Susan Blamk, Barbara B. Blum, Matthew Drennan, Barbara Gordon Espejo, Ester Fuchs, Cynthia B. Green, James M. Hartman, Raymond D. Horton, Sarah F. Liebschutz, David Lewin, Irene Lurie, Paul D. Moore, James C. Musselwhite Jr., Martin Shefter, Kenneth E. Thorpe, Emanuel Tobier, Katherine Trent, 

Little over a century ago, New York and Budapest were both flourishing cities engaging in spectacular modernization. By 1930, New York had emerged as an innovating cosmopolitan metropolis, while Budapest languished under the conditions that would foster fascism. Budapest and New York explores the increasingly divergent trajectories of these once-similar cities through the perspectives of both Hungarian and American experts in the fields of political, cultural, social and art history. Their original essays illuminate key aspects of urban life that most reveal the turn-of-the-century evolution of New York and Budapest: democratic participation, use of public space, neighborhood ethnicity, and culture high and low.

What comes across most strikingly in these essays is New York's cultivation of social and political pluralism, a trend not found in Budapest. Nationalist ideology exerted tremendous pressure on Budapest's ethnic groups to assimilate to a single Hungarian language and culture. In contrast, New York's ethnic diversity was transmitted through a mass culture that celebrated ethnicity while muting distinct ethnic traditions, making them accessible to a national audience. While Budapest succumbed to the patriotic imperatives of a nation threatened by war, revolution, and fascism, New York, free from such pressures, embraced the variety of its people and transformed its urban ethos into a paradigm for America.

Budapest and New York is the lively story of the making of metropolitan culture in Europe and America, and of the influential relationship between city and nation. In unifying essays, the editors observe comparisons not only between the cities, but in the scholarly outlooks and methodologies of Hungarian and American histories. This volume is a unique urban history. Begun under the unfavorable conditions of a divided world, it represents a breakthrough in cross-cultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary historical work.

THOMAS BENDER is University Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at New York University.

CARL E. SCHORSKE is professor emeritus at Princeton University, and the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture.

CONTRIBUTORS: Thomas Bender, Elizabeth Blackmar, Geza Buzinkay, Wanda M. Corn, Deborah Dash Moore, Philip Fisher, Eva Forgacs, Gabor Gyani, David C. Hammack, Peter Hanak, Neil Harris, Miklos Lacko, Zsuzsa L. Nagy, Roy Rosenzweig, Carl E. Schorske, Robert W. Snyder, and Istvan Teplan.

Does social science influence social policy? This is a topic of perennial concern among students of politics, the economy, and other social institutions. In Effective Social Science, eight prominent social researchers offer first-hand descriptions of the impact of their work on government and corporate policy.

In their own words, these noted political scientists, economists, and sociologists—among them such influential scholars as James Coleman, Joseph Pechman, and Eliz Ginzberg—tell us what it was like to become involved in the making of social policy. These rich personal narratives, derived from detailed interviews conducted by Bernard Barber (himself a veteran of the biomedical poliy arena), illuminate the role of social science in diverse areas, including school desegregation, comprehensive income taxation, military manpower utilization, transportation deregulation, and the protection of privacy.

The patterns traced in this volume indicate that social science can influence policy, but only as part of a pluralistic, political process; effective social research requires advocacy as well as a conducive social and idealogical climate. For anyone curious about the relationship between social knowledge and social action, this book provides striking illustration and fruitful analysis.

BERNARD BARBER is professor at Barnard College and the Graduate faculties at Columbia University.

Winner of the 1973 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Less than 2 percent of some 4000 adults prosecuted for participating in the bloodiest ghetto revolt of this generation served any time in jail as a result of their conviction and sentencing. Why? Why, in contrast, did the majority of those arrested following a brief and minor confrontation with police in a different city receive far harsher treatment than ordinarily meted out for comparable offenses in "normal" times? What do these incidents tell us about the nature of legal repression in the American state?

No coherent theory of political repression in the liberal state exists today. Neither the liberal view of repression as "anomaly" nor the radical view of repression as "fascist core" appears to come to grips with the distinctive characteristics of legal repression in the liberal state.

This book attempts to arrive at a more adequate understanding of these "distinctive characteristics" by means of a detailed analysis of the legal response to the most serious violent challenge to the existing political order since the Great Depression—the black ghetto revolts between 1964 and 1968.

Using police and court records, and extensive interviews with judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and detention officials, Professor Balbus provides a complete reconstruction of the response of the criminal courts of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago to the "civil disorders" that occurred in these cities. What emerges is a disturbing picture of the relationship between court systems and participants and the local political environments in which they operate.

ISAAC D. BALBUS has been assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, and will join the faculty of York College of the City University of New York as associate professor of political science in the fall of 1973. He received his B.A. in Government from Colby College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He is the author of a number of articles on Marxism, Elitist Theory, and Pluralism.