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When members are elected to the House of Representatives they have a certain freedom to decide how they will act as members and how they will build their reputations. Just as in the market place entrepreneurs build businesses, so in the House of Representatives members have the freedom to choose to build legislative programs that will enhance their reputations in the institution. And yet entrepreneurship is also costly to members. Gregory Wawro explains why members of the House engage in legislative entrepreneurship by examining what motivates them to acquire policy knowledge, draft legislation, build coalitions, and push their legislation in the House. He considers what incentives members have to perform what many have perceived to be the difficult and unrewarding tasks of legislating.

This book shows how becoming a legislative entrepreneur relates to members' goals of reelection, enacting good public policy, and obtaining influence in the House. The analysis differs from previous studies of this behavior, which for the most part have employed case study methods and have relied on anecdotal evidence to support their arguments. Wawro analyzes legislative entrepreneurship in a general and systematic fashion, developing hypotheses from rational-choice-based theories and testing these hypotheses using quantitative methods.

Wawro argues that members engage in legislative entrepreneurship in order to get ahead within the House. He finds that the more legislative entrepreneurship that members engage in, the more likely it is that they will advance to prestigious positions.

This book is of interest to students of Congress, legislative behavior and institutions, elections, and campaign finance.

Gregory Wawro is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.

Hiplife is a popular music genre in Ghana that mixes hip-hop beatmaking and rap with highlife music, proverbial speech, and Akan storytelling. In the 1990s, young Ghanaian musicians were drawn to hip-hop's dual ethos of black masculine empowerment and capitalist success. They made their underground sound mainstream by infusing carefree bravado with traditional respectful oratory and familiar Ghanaian rhythms. Living the Hiplife is an ethnographic account of hiplife in Ghana and its diaspora, based on extensive research among artists and audiences in Accra, Ghana's capital city; New York; and London. Jesse Weaver Shipley examines the production, consumption, and circulation of hiplife music, culture, and fashion in relation to broader cultural and political shifts in neoliberalizing Ghana.

Shipley shows how young hiplife musicians produce and transform different kinds of value—aesthetic, moral, linguistic, economic—using music to gain social status and wealth, and to become respectable public figures. In this entrepreneurial age, youth use celebrity as a form of currency, aligning music-making with self-making and aesthetic pleasure with business success. Registering both the globalization of electronic, digital media and the changing nature of African diasporic relations to Africa, hiplife links collective Pan-Africanist visions with individualist aspiration, highlighting the potential and limits of social mobility for African youth.

The author has also directed a film entitled Living the Hiplife and with two DJs produced mixtapes that feature the music in the book available for free download.