The central premise of this edited collection is set out with admirable clarity on the first page of the opening chapter: “It is both obvious and well-known that the immediate social circumstances of people's lives influence what they believe and do about politics. Even so, relatively few political scientists incorporate these principles into their analysis” (p. 3). Alan Zuckerman tackles this problem with a selection of chapters, written by authors with a range of intellectual pedigrees, that set out to show how what is “both obvious and well-known” can be incorporated into rigorous political science. The individual chapters are too numerous and diverse to review in detail here. What is perhaps more useful is to consider the extent to which, taken together, they map out a potentially fruitful line of future development for the discipline.

Much is made by several authors to the contributions made by the “Columbia School” of political sociology, and a casual reader might take this book as something of an homage to the past glories of this research tradition. Despite a certain amount of nostalgia in the prose at certain points, however, all of the chapters are essentially forward looking. The interesting question to ask is whether they collectively reflect an ongoing “sociological turn” in political science. This turn may in part be about reopening classic but recently neglected questions, but it may also reflect a recent and vigorous growth of interest in the analysis of social networks in general, and in particular of the impact of social networks on the evolution of individual preferences.

What the chapters highlight very clearly is the gulf—which may now be narrowing rather than widening—between economic and sociological models of politics. Of the many ways of characterizing this gulf, these essays help us see that perhaps the most important has to do with the source and trajectory of individual preferences. “Economic” models (focusing as they typically do on markets rather than marketing) almost invariably take individual preferences and tastes as raw primitives. “Sociological” models almost invariably see preferences and tastes both as endogenous and as one of the most important things to be explained. The distinctive contribution of The Social Logic of Politics is to refocus our attention on the source and evolution of preferences, while at the same time demonstrating that this can be done without sacrificing the rigor and discipline of modern political science.

Thus, Robert Huckfeldt, Paul E. Johnson, and John Sprague (Chapter 2), Lavia Stoker and M. Kent Jennings (Chapter 3), Alan S. Zuckerman, Jennifer Fitzgerald, and Josip Dasovic (Chapter 4), Sidney Verba, Kaylehman Schlozman, and Nancy Burns (Chapter 5), and Jeffrey Levine (Chapter 7) all use the sophisticated and rigorous analyses of survey evidence to explore ways in which political choice and attitudes are affected by the other humans with whom survey respondents say they interact—holding constant all of the usual causal suspects. These chapters combine to provide us with a systematic empirical documentation, for the United States at least, of what the opening chapter claimed to be “obvious and well-known.” The evidence is convincing.

There is, of course, always the potential for selection bias—not explored in detail in this book—in survey evidence on the “network contacts” of respondents. It seems at least plausible that those explicitly named by respondents as people with whom they discuss politics may be a biased selection of those with whom politics is actually discussed—contacts who are more similar in views or more persuasive, perhaps. In this context, the distinctive and innovative approach used by the political geographers Ron J. Johnston and Charles J. Pattie (Chapter 10) is of particular interest. Building on British survey evidence, these authors constructed, for every one of the 2,731 respondents in the British Election Study, “a series of bespoke neighborhoods around their homes, containing the nearest 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 and 10000 residents” (p. 188). They assembled independent socioeconomic data for each of these neighborhoods and showed that the individual's bespoke neighborhood had a strong contextual effect on voting, controlling for all relevant individual-level characteristics. This is an elegant way to show the effect of social context on individual behavior.

While most of the book chapters apply new evidence and techniques to classic questions, the final two chapters, under the section heading “Looking Ahead,” introduce new research paradigms. If our premise is that the preferences of one person are endogenous to the preferences of others, then we self-evidently have a complex system. Techniques of simulation and agent-based modeling have been developed, within what we might think of as the “Santa Fe School,” to handle such problems, which can prove quite intractable using traditional methods.

The contribution by Paul E. Johnson and Robert E. Huckfeldt (Chapter 13) uses agent-based modeling to wrestle with one of the most serious inconsistencies generated by many models of endogenous preferences: that recursive mutual influence of individuals' preferences on each other tends to lead to an evolution of the system toward total preference homogeneity—which we do not observe empirically. Their solution is neither to erect barriers to interaction between individuals nor to introduce random mutations of tastes, but to model strong local reinforcement effects on the way that individual interactions affect opinion change.

Finally, James H. Fowler offers a “small world” model of turnout (Chapter 14). We might well question the substantive plausibility of the conclusion that cost-benefit calculations associated with turning out to vote are affected by “turnout cascades,” whereby one person turning out affects the turnout probability of others. However, this chapter is very significant in the context of this book in that it is the only one to use what we might think of as the “new network sociology” pioneered by scholars such as Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz—and indeed to refer to this literature. While turnout may be one of the less promising applications, the arguments advanced in many of the empirical chapters in The Social Logic of Politics cry out for the type of theoretical microfoundation that could be provided by the rigorous network modeling used by Fowler in the book's final chapter.

Overall, this is an important collection of essays, since few of us would deny the book's fundamental assumption about what is obvious and well known, yet few of us really know what to do about implementing rigorous models of complex political interactions with endogenous preferences. This is an essential read for those who worry about such matters.