With this volume, Robert Jackman and Ross Miller pursue a twofold ambition. First, they want to demonstrate that most of the research on political culture and the impact of values on political behavior can be questioned, both on theoretical as on methodological grounds. Second, they want to demonstrate that their theoretical model, based on the assumption that actors optimize their behavior within durable institutional restraints, is better able to explain what people do with regard to politics.

The book starts with an all-out attack on the work of various authors using cultural traditions and values as a determinant of political behavior. Jackman and Miller question the research results of authors as diverse as Max Weber, Gabriel Almond, and Sidney Verba, Robert Putnam, and Ronald Inglehart. Subsequently, the authors present some of their own research in an effort to demonstrate that an approach based on institutions can predict voter turnout or the success of extreme right-wing parties. It is important to note here that they do not adhere to a strict rational choice paradigm, and they are indeed quite critical about the more narrow interpretations of this paradigm. Their assumption is that the goals that actors pursue are not preestablished, and therefore these goals will show a considerable degree of variance. According to Jackman and Miller, however, actors will try to optimize their pursuit of these goals, given a specific set of institutional constraints that they are not able to change themselves. In this respect, their work fits quite closely in the “embedded rationalism” approach.

While in the introduction and the conclusion the authors claim that both of their goals are equally important, one cannot help noticing a certain imbalance in the book. Almost three quarters is devoted to their criticism of what Alejandro Portes labeled the “value enactment” approach, leaving only one quarter of the text to present the merits of their own institutionalist approach. Somehow, this is reminiscent of the reports one sometimes receives from academic journals, where the comments made by the reviewer are longer and more elaborated than the original manuscript itself. A further weakness is that the evidence they present to substantiate their claim is rather limited. First, they demonstrate that institutional constraints determine voter turnout, and second, they explain the success of extreme right parties in Europe using various institutional measurements. So in both instances they explain electoral behavior, and this form of political participation is notoriously easy to manipulate, using electoral engineering. It is self-evident that in a disproportional electoral system, it is not an attractive option to vote for a small extremist party, while this is more easily done within a proportional system.

Nevertheless, the chapters in which Jackman and Miller offer criticism against the cultural approach are very instructive (some of this material was already published in various journals). The authors do not leave a stone unturned to demonstrate that the cultural approach does not just lead to cultural conservatism, but that it is also based on wrong interpretations of the data at hand.

For example, Max Weber based his thesis about the economic consequences of Protestantism, among other things, on the observation that in the German state of Baden, Protestant children were enrolled in more job market–oriented schools than Catholic children. The authors demonstrate, quite correctly, that Weber did not take into account the fact that there happened to be more of these schools in the predominantly Protestant areas of Baden than in the predominantly Catholic ones. Based on this observation, they offer the institutionalist explanation that Protestant parents simply sent their children to these schools because they happened to be more readily available in their neighborhoods. Their observations no doubt are correct, and indeed they have been made earlier, and one should have no illusions about the statistical expertise available to Weber almost a century ago. The question, however, is whether they entail the theoretical implications that they claim they have. First, Jackman and Miller do not offer any explanation for the presence of these schools in these districts. One could assume that more of them were established in Protestant districts exactly because of the larger demand for this kind of education in these areas. The general point that is missing is that if their claim that institutions constrain human behavior is correct, this just leads to the research question: How were these institutions established in the first place? Second, even if Weber got his figures about school enrollment in the state of Baden completely wrong, does this invalidate his theoretical claim in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)? During the past century, this book has proved to be immensely influential and inspiring, and this will remain the case, no matter what the correct school enrollment figures in Baden might have been. Some classic volumes remain inspiring, even if the quality of the fieldwork does not live up to current standards.

Despite the methodological rigor and expertise, the material presented in Before Norms does not live up entirely to the expectations the authors created themselves. Jackman and Miller clearly claim that their embedded rationalism model is superior in explaining political behavior than the civic culture model: “We believe that the institutional account easily outperforms the cultural interpretation” (p. 200). What they do in this volume, however, is to offer criticism on some of the work of Weber, Putnam, and Inglehart, three authors who dealt with very large questions of social transformation. They limit the application of their own model, on the other hand, to two rather limited cases of electoral behavior. The real test for the alleged superiority of their institutionalist paradigm would be to know whether they are better able to explain the variance in government performance of regional Italian governments than Putnam did using cultural explanations in Making Democracy Work (1993), a volume that is heavily criticized by them. In this book at least, Jackman and Miller, do not make any effort to deliver that proof.