In this engaging and meticulously constructed statistical analysis of attitudes among South Africa's apartheid-defined racial groups (African/black, Coloured, Asian, white), James Gibson sets out to do two things. One is to map the state of political reconciliation among these groups. The second is to measure the impact of South Africa's truth and reconciliation process, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in promoting reconciliation. The analysis is based largely on a national opinion survey carried out in 2000 and 2001, but also draws comparatively, where possible and appropriate, on a similar survey from 1997.

Taking reconciliation as a multidimensional concept, Gibson measures it along four distinct “subdimensions.” At the individual level, he assesses the degree to which South Africans express equal respect for members of other groups. At the cultural level, he measures South Africans' commitment to the rule of law (as a proxy for the human rights culture the TRC sought to build). At the group level, he assesses the levels of tolerance that South Africans feel for their political enemies. And at the institutional level, he assesses South Africans' loyalty to the new institutional order by examining their attachment to parliament and to the constitutional court. The book walks the reader through each of these measures, and it is an enlightening walk. Overall, the findings are sobering: South Africans are not very reconciled (partly because of racial isolation); no group is strongly attached to the rule of law, though whites are more attached than blacks; South Africans tend to be quite intolerant of their political enemies, and intolerance breaks down significantly along racial lines (though notably, South Africans across racial groups are least tolerant of organizations that are weakly allied to the rule of law); South Africans across racial groups tend to think that amnesty produces unfair outcomes.

Yet these dispiriting trends mask considerable, and frequently surprising, variations within and between racial groups. For instance, a greater proportion of blacks than whites “believe that the struggle to preserve apartheid was just” (p. 83). Whites are more attached to the rule of law, but less attached to parliament or the constitutional court. Most Africans oppose amnesty but support the TRC. Most are angry at the government's failure to compensate victims of apartheid, but that does not appear to have undermined the new regime's moral authority. Thus, one of the book's most striking features is its vivid depiction of the complexity and fluidity of political attitudes in transition as South Africans negotiate overlapping identities, affiliations, and perspectives on race, culture, and politics. For this reason alone, it is an extremely valuable addition to the scholarship on sociocultural and political dynamics in contemporary South Africa.

In addition, Gibson finds support for the hypothesis that truth contributes to reconciliation. To test this, he delineates the elements of a “collective memory” of apartheid advanced by the TRC (its “truth”), and measures the degree to which racial groups accept this account of history. Then he tests the acceptance of this truth against the degree to which South Africans express attitudes of reconciliation toward one another. He concludes that the TRC was quite successful in creating a collective memory that acknowledged that all sides in the liberation struggle carried out vile acts. This established a “moderate view of apartheid” (p. 99) that made it easier for all sides to accept the TRC's truth and undermined each side's ability to present their struggle as one of “pure” against “evil” forces. As such, it facilitated reconciliation.

The evidence for a causal relationship between truth and reconciliation is not strong, however. Careful not to overstate his claims, Gibson conjectures about the processes whereby truth leads to reconciliation. He suggests that “the truth and reconciliation process may have changed the way South Africans think about each other by creating cognitive dissonance and by mitigating cognitive dogmatism,” thereby weakening interracial fear, suspicion, and hatred (p. 158). But alternative conjectures are equally plausible. As much opinion polling in the mid–1990s showed, attitudinal shifts were much messier and drawn out than Gibson's account suggests. In his view, the truth and reconciliation process brought about a process that was, in fact, well under way when the TRC was established. Indeed, it is more likely that the TRC marshaled deepening uncertainties and incoherences into an authoritative narrative than that it created the cognitive dissonances. Here one wishes for closer attention to the dynamics of the transition that the author's dependence on cross-sectional data disallows.

Among the many arresting findings of the book, two stand out for their broader implications. One, in a nuanced discussion of why South Africans may be skeptical of the rule of law, is the conclusion that “for South Africans of every race, law seems to be perceived as a mechanism for preventing the majority from getting what it wants. Those who believe in strong majoritarianism are much less likely to believe in legal universalism” (p. 200; italics in original). This finding provides principled support for the stress others have laid on the importance of protecting minority rights in new democracies (see, for instance, the UN Development Program's 2004 Human Development Report). The other is that even if citizens oppose amnesty, their opinions are substantially moderated by the presence in the process of some form of justice (distributive, procedural, restorative, or—last and least—retributive). As Gibson stresses, “justice does matter” (p. 284), but it can be realized in a variety of forms and depends on practical perceptions of fairness within the community—what one might call the popular moral economy (not his term). Gibson does not suggest how we might analyze this, but it opens a promising avenue for further research.

The book's findings also invoke new analytical challenges, notably the need to understand how attitude formation occurs in transitional polities. For instance, while its account of the TRC's actual workings is sketchy, the data suggest that this process may have been crucial in cementing its legitimacy and moral authority. In addition, the political dynamics of transition may have a causal impact on the relationship between truth and reconciliation that the book does not probe. And, as Gibson notes, we need to know more about how institutional consolidation occurs than his analysis allows. Taken together, these findings suggest the salience of process as a causal factor that is not taken up here. That said, this is a clear, creative, and insightful empirical analysis. Inasmuch as social science research advances through the production of new questions as well as new knowledge, it is exemplary, and will be enlightening and useful not only to transitions scholars and South Africanists but also to students in methodology classes.