Emerging forms of empowered participatory governance have generated considerable scholarly excitement, but critics continue to ask if such initiatives are “for real”: Are participatory governance processes sufficiently independent? Do citizen participants make good policy choices? An in-depth look at the case of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform suggests that real citizen empowerment depends on both the institutional constraints of the participa-tory setting and how citizen interests and arguments for policy outcomes crystallize over the course of a participatory process.

This paper focuses on how culture and ritual in social movements can be forms of protest or conduits to contentious politics. Based on the Montreal cases of the anglophone women's performance scene in the 1990s and the 2000 World March of Women campaign, we argue that the context in which culture is produced and consumed affects its political character and potential. Networks among activists and organizations in social movement communities affect the extent to which participants interpret and use cultural productions and rituals to support political change. Movement campaigns play an important role in giving political meaning to cultural rituals and providing opportunities for participants in cultural activities to become involved in contentious political action.

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In this well-written and well-researched short volume, John K. Wilson takes upon himself the task of defending all liberals and leftists in the academy against the charge that they are imposing an oppressive "political correctness" (PC) that stifles academic freedom and free expression on campus, indoctrinates students with radical ideologies, and promotes intolerance of any dissent from the right. Wilson is well equipped for his task. As the editor of Democratic Culture, the newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, and as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he claims to have "some insight into the darker side of academic life" (p. 159). To his personal experiences, Wilson adds thorough journalistic investigations of a large number of notorious cases of PC oppression, each of which is well told and documented. The result is a solid rebuttal of books like Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (NY: Vintage, 1992).Wilson's response to the conservative criticisms has two parts. First he exposes political correctness as a "myth" built up from distortions, anecdotes, and untruths. Second, he constructs a counter-case that the real threat to academic freedom comes from the right--that a "conservative correctness" reigns instead. The notion of myth is central to Wilson's overall thesis. He does not claim that incidents of political correctness--intolerance of conservative views by liberal and leftist faculty and students--never occur. They do, and Wilson documents several clear cases. But political correctness is a myth because these and other isolated incidents, many misreported or distorted by repetition, are taken as representative evidence of a repressive campus environment. "The distinguishing mark of a myth," he quotes Walter Lippmann,"is that truth and error, fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of credibility" (p. 2). Given this standard, political correctness is indeed a myth. In his introductory chapter, Wilson outlines the key elements of the myth-creation process and the history of the PC idea. Two techniques are [2]. Ibid., p. 34.

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