Reviews

Harry Eckstein, Frederic J. Fleron, Erik P. Hoffmann & William M. Reisinger with Richard Ahl, Russell Bova & Philip G. Roeder, Can Democracy Take Root in Post‐Soviet Russia? Explorations in State‐Society Relations. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 1998, xi + 418 pp., $64.00 h/b, $21.95 p/b.

Barnett R. Rubin & Jack Snyder (eds), Post‐Soviet Political Order. Conflict and State Building, London: Routledge, 1998, xi + 201 pp., £15.99.

Ben Fowkes (ed.), Russia and Chechnia: The Permanent Crisis. Essays on Russo‐Chechen Relations. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, viii+ 188 pp., £42.50.

Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. London: Yale University Press, 1998, xii + 436 pp., £25.00.

Sebastian Smith, Allah's Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998, x + 288 pp., £19.95.

Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: Nation and State Building. London: Routledge, 1998, xiv + 298 pp., £50.00.

Lutz Hoffmann & Axel Siedenberg (eds), Aufbruch in die Marktwirtschaft. Reformen in der Ukraine von innen betrachtet. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1997, 296 pp.

OECD, OECD Economic Surveys. Russian Federation 1997. Paris: Centre for Co‐operation with the Economies in Transition and OECD, 1997, x + 275 pp.

Arista Maria Cirtautas, The Polish Solidarity Movement. Revolution, Democracy and Natural Rights. London: Routledge, 1997, xii + 324 pp., £50.00.

David Stark & Laszlo Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xi + 284 pp., £15.95.

Jon Elster, Claus Offe & Ulrich K. Preuss with Frank Boenker, Ulrike Goetting & Friedbert W. Rueb, Institutional Design in Post‐Communist Societies, Rebuilding the Ship at Sea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xii + 350 pp., £14.95.

Daniel Vaughan‐Whitehead (ed.), Paying the Price. The Wage Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xxviii + 418 pp., £55.00.

David Clapham, József Hegedüs, Keith Kintrea & Iván Tosics with Helen Kay (eds), Housing Privatization in Eastern Europe. London: Greenwood Press, 1996, xiii + 205 pp., £42.50.

Fergus Carr (ed.), Europe: The Cold Divide. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xii + 208 pp., £42.50.

Ian Anthony (ed.), Russia and the Arms Trade. Oxford, Oxford University Press and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1998, xiv + 304 pp., £35.00.

Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev. Baden‐Baden: Nomos, 609 pp., DM69.00.

Yongjin Zhang & Rouben Azizian (eds), Ethnic Challenges Beyond Borders: Chinese and Russian Perspectives of the Central Asian Conundrum. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xii + 240 pp., £42.50.

R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century—and After. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 1997, xx + 526 pp., £50.00.

Richard & Ben Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 1997, xv + 297 pp., £16.99.

Jeffrey L. Roberg, Soviet Science Under Control: The Struggle for Influence. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xii + 169 pp., £42.50.

Vincent Barnett, Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development. Long Cycles and Industrial Growth in Historical Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, xiv + 251 pp., £50.00.

Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. London: Routledge, 1997, xv + 269 pp., £13.99.

Arto Luukkanen, The Religious Policy of the Stalinist State. A Case Study: The Central Standing Commission on Religious Questions, 1929–1938. Helsinki: SHS, 1997, 214 pp.

J. Otto Pohl, The Stalinist Penal System: A Statistical History of Soviet Repression and Terror, 1930–1953. London: Macfarland, 1997, ix + 165 pp. £31.50.

Judith Pallot, Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998, xix + 264 pp., £45.00.

Amy C. Singleton, No Place Like Home. The Literary Artist and Russia's Search for Cultural Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, x + 193 pp, $17.95.

Stephen C. Hutchings. Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xiii + 295 pp., £40.00.     

Reviews

Martin McCauley, Who's Who in Russia since 1900. London: Routledge, 1997, xxiv + 268 pp., £12.99 p/b.

Michael McFaul, Russia's 1996 Presidential Election. The End of Polarized Politics. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1997, xiii + 170 pp., $17.95.

Laura Belin & Robert W. Orttung, with Ralph S. Clem and Peter R. Craumer, The Russian Parliamentary Elections of 1995: The Battle for the Duma. London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997, xii + 203 pp., $62.95.

Stephen White, Alex Pravda & Zvi Gitelman (eds), Developments in Russian Politics 4. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, xvi + 304 pp., £42.50 h/b, £13.99 p/b.

Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander Motyl & Boris Shor (eds), Nations in Transit 1997. Civil Society, Democracy and Markets in East Central Europe and the Newly Independent States. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997, 418 pp., $49.95.

Oskar Krejci, History of Elections in Bohemia and Moravia. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs CDXXXIII, 1995, xliv + 425 pp.

Anne Lorentz & Marianne Rostgaard (eds), The Aftermath of Real Existing Socialism in Eastern Europe. Volume 2. People and Technology in the Process of Transition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, ix + 309 pp., £50.00.

Yudit Kiss, The Defence Industry in East‐Central Europe: Restructuring and Conversion. Oxford: Oxford University Press/Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1997, vii + 237 pp., £22.50.

Shiping Zheng, Party vs. State in Post‐1949 China: The Institutional Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, xiv + 294 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, x +425 pp., £25.00.

David Christian, Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, viii + 478 pp., £15.99.

Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev & William G. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. London: Edward Arnold, 1997, xviii + 782 pp., £59.99.

Michael David‐Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, xvii + 298 pp., £33.50. >Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah and Maria Rubins, Oxford: Westview, 1997, vii + 408 pp., £25.50.

Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, ix + 468 pp., £47.00 h/b, £19.50 p/b.

Knut Andreas Grimstad & Ingunn Lunde (eds), Celebrating Creativity: Essays in Honour of Jostein B0rtnes. Bergen: University of Bergen, 1997, 350 pp.     

Elections and Representation in Local Government: A Victorian Case Study

This article examines the application of different views of representation in the electoral systems at local government level: interest, corporate and mirror representation. The electoral framework underpins the process of representation, influencing both who are eligible to become voters and how their votes are collected and counted. The paper examines the interrelationship between representation and the electoral framework in local government in Victoria. We use a historical analysis, and identify a long period of interest representation; a short, relatively recent period of corporate representation; and an attempt to introduce some elements of mirror representation. We conclude by arguing that local electoral reform needs to take into account the multiple meanings of representation.     

Issue Importance and Performance Voting

Issue importance mediates the impact of public policy issues on electoral decisions. Individuals who consider that an issue is important are more likely to rely on their attitudes toward that issue when evaluating candidates and deciding for whom to vote. The logic behind the link between issue importance and issue voting should translate to a link between issue importance and performance voting. Incumbent performance evaluations regarding an issue should have a stronger impact on the vote choice of individuals who find that issue important. The analysis demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between performance evaluations and issue importance. People concerned about an issue assign more weight to their evaluations of the government's performance on that issue when making up their mind.     

How well is the United States competing? A comment on Papadakis

We contend that Papadakis's inferences regarding past and future competitiveness crises cannot be made on the basis of the evidence she has presented. We support this assertion in three ways. First, we argue that the import penetration ratio is not a reasonable measure of national competitiveness in international markets. Second, we show that conventional macroeconomic models can explain the deterioration in the trade balance during the 1980s. Third, we present data demonstrating that, as of 1990, the United States had very low unit labor costs relative to other developed countries, and had the highest level of aggregate productivity in the world.     

When Is a Gerrymander Not a Gerrymander: Who Benefits and Who Loses from the Changed Rules for Defining Parliamentary Constituencies?

Members of the British Labour party have, not for the first time, criticised the Boundary Commissions’ proposals for new constituency boundaries as gerrymandering. This represents a misuse of the term: the Commissions have produced recommended constituencies in the context of new rules for such redistributions that give precedence to equality of electorates across all seats and the boundaries of those constituencies have been defined without any reference to the likely electoral consequences. The Conservatives, who were responsible for the change in the rules to emphasise electoral equality, wanted to remove a decades‐long Labour advantage in the translation of votes into seats because of variations in constituency size, and the Commissions’ implementation of those rules has achieved that. A Labour advantage has been removed but not replaced by a Conservative advantage: in terms of electoral equality between the two, the playing field has been levelled. Labour's claim to have been disadvantaged by decisions on the electoral register is also examined; the disadvantage is probably only small.     

Predicting Revolt: Fragility Indexes and the Level of Violence and Instability in the Arab Spring

This article is one of the first to systematically assess the ability of state fragility measures to predict violent protests and adverse regime changes in countries. We focus on the Arab Spring as an example of a situation that such measures ought to predict. Through a variety of analyses, we find that none of the measures are predictive. We then create a simple model using the literature of protest and revolts to predict both the level of violence and the extent of regime change in the Arab Spring countries. This simpler model does a better job of predicting the level of involvement in the Arab Spring than any of the complex State Fragility Indexes. Thus, the goal of this article is not to explain the causes of the Arab Spring, but to add to the discussion of the predictive value of measures of instability.