Book reviews

Poverty, Progress and Exclusion: an Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century. By Rosemary Thorp. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press for the Inter‐American Development Bank and the European Union, 1998. Pp.xiv + 369. £20.50. ISBN 1 886938 35 0

Economic Dynamism in the Asia‐Pacific: The Growth of Integration and Competitiveness. Edited by Graham Thompson. London: Routledge, 1998. Pp.402. £50 and £14.99. ISBN 0 415 17273 X and 17274 8

India and Pakistan: The First Fifty Years. Edited by Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg, and Dennis Kux. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.xii + 217. £32.50 and £10.95. ISBN 0 521 64185 3 and 64585 9

Agencies in Foreign Aid: Comparing China, Sweden and the United States in Tanzania. Edited by Goran Hyden and Rwekaza Mukandala. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp.ix + 246. $69.95. ISBN 0 312 22098 7

Market Integration, Regionalism and the Global Economy. Edited by Richard E. Baldwin, Daniel Cohen, Andre Sapir and Anthony Venables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xix + 344. £45 and £16.95. ISBN 0 521 64589 1 and 0 521 64181 0

Instruments of Change: Motivating and Financing Sustainable Development. By Theodore Panayotou. Earthscan in association with the United Nations Environment Programme, 1998. Pp.240. £19.95. ISBN 1 85383 467 X

Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses and Prevention. By Joachim von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu and Patrick Webb. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp.xvii + 218. £32.50. ISBN 0 8018 6121 7

The East Asian Welfare Model: Welfare Orientalism and the State. Edited by Roger Goodman, Gordon White and Huck‐ju Kwon. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp.206. £17.99. ISBN 0 415 17211 X

Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm. Edited by Ronaldo Munck and Denis O'Hearn. London and New York: Zed Books, 1999. Pp.xx + 217. £39.95 and £22.50. ISBN 1 85649 637 6 and 638 4

Streetlife China: Transforming Culture, Rights and Markets. By Michael Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.xvi + 304. £13.95 (US$19.95) and £37.50 (US$54.95). ISBN 0 521 63719 8 and 63141 6     

Rural Electrification and Fertility – Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire

Using household-level survey data from Côte d'Ivoire, this paper investigates the determinants of fertility with a particular focus on the effect of electrification. Based on a Poisson regression model, our analysis suggests a highly significant relationship between fertility and electricity, but one that is only revealed when the model distinguishes between rural and urban areas. Specifically, we find a positive association between electricity and fertility for urban households, contrasted by a negative relationship for rural households. This dichotomy is suggested to reflect the influences of electricity in facilitating child care, offset by its modernising impacts through the provision of information.     

Moral Concerns and Policy Attitudes: Investigating the Influence of Elite Rhetoric

A growing body of research documents the crucial role played by moral concerns in the formation of attitudes and a wide range of political behaviors. Yet extant models of moral judgment portray a direct linkage between moral intuitions and policy attitudes, leaving little room for the influence of political context. In this article, we argue that political rhetoric plays an important role in facilitating the connection between moral intuitions and political attitudes. Using a unique combination of media content analysis of the stem cell debate and individual-level measures of the public’s moral foundations, we examine the role of rhetoric in linking a person’s moral foundations to his or her attitudes. Our results show that individuals who are the most likely to have been exposed to political rhetoric have the strongest connection between their moral foundations and their attitudes on the issue. We also find that rhetoric was persuasive on this moralized issue and present suggestive evidence that it was most persuasive among those who endorsed the relevant moral foundation.     

Institutional Power and the Risk of Finance

ABSTRACT

This article examines the nature of financial reason and the firm-level processes shaping and sustaining financial accumulation. It argues that the standard views of financial reason offered by neoclassical theory and international political economy prevent a nuanced understanding of key corporate power systems. Drawing on Hilferding’s theory of finance capital as well as his unique methodological approach, the paper shows that these accounts fail to consider properly the range of forces constituting financial rationality.     

Foreign patents for the technology transfer from laboratories of U.S. federal agencies

The Journal of Technology Transfer - This paper documents the importance of foreign patents for the technology transfer of inventions created in the laboratories of the U.S. federal agencies....     

Validating Self-Nomination in Gang Research: Assessing Differences in Gang Embeddedness Across Non-, Current,and Former Gang Members

Objective

The study of gang members is closely linked to the self-nomination method. It is timely to revisit the criterion validity of self-nomination, as recent theoretical and empirical advancements in gang disengagement necessitate further differentiating current from former gang members. This study assessed differences in gang embeddedness—a construct that taps individual immersion within deviant social networks—across three groups: current gang members, former gang members, and those individuals who have never joined a gang.

Methods

Data gathered in 2011 from a high-risk sample of 621 individuals in five cities were used to assess the validity of the self-nomination method. Standardized differences in a mixed graded response model of gang embeddedness were evaluated across the three statuses of gang membership.

Results

Self-nomination was strongly related to embeddedness in gangs, even after controlling for demographic, theoretical, and gang-related factors. The strongest predictor of gang embeddedness was self-nomination as a current or a former gang member, although current gang members maintained levels of gang embeddedness about one standard deviation greater than former gang members. Self-nomination was also the primary determinant of gang embeddedness for males, females, whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Conclusion

The results of this study provide strong evidence in support of the use of self-nomination to differentiate between non-gang and gang members as well as current and former gang members, adding to a body of research demonstrating that self-nomination is a valid measure of gang membership.     

Threats at Home,Threats Abroad: Bargaining and War in the Shadow of Coups and Revolutions

I analyze a two-level game in which a leader bargains over the spoils of international bargaining with a domestic opposition that can threaten her with a coup or revolution. While fighting an international war shrinks the domestic pie, it also alters the distribution of domestic power. This has three main implications. First, if war will undermine the opposition, fighting may be so attractive that leaders demand more for peace than foreign states are willing to give, leading to war. Second, if war will bolster the opposition, leaders accept harsh terms to avoid fighting—strategic selection that has implications for the observed relationship between war and political survival. Finally, prospective shifts in the distribution of domestic power caused by war can reduce the effects of international asymmetric information, though the result may be to increase or decrease the chances of war.     

Still Divided by a Common Language: Discontentment and the Semantics of Power

In a recent response to an article of mine on the 'faces of power' controversy published in this journal ( Politics Vol. 18. No. 1), James Doyle provides an important, sophisticated and provocative attempt to rehabilitate Lukes' three-dimensional conception of power from the criticisms of myself and others. He argues, in particular, that Lukes' understanding of power is not compromised by its reliance upon a distinction between subjective and objective interests since such a distinction is, in fact, 'an integral part of the logical grammar of the concept'. Nor, he suggests, is Lukes wrong to raise the spectre of the concept of 'false consciousness since the notion of 'duping others' is also 'internal to the logic of the concept' of power. Finally, Doyle argues that my chosen reformulation of the concept of power as context- and conduct-shaping unwittingly exposes me to precisely the same criticism(s) which I direct at Lukes. In this brief response I seek to clarify and defend my earlier position in the face of certain obvious misunderstandings in Doyle's reading, whilst re-stating my principal point of departure from Lukes' formulation.     

Willing Executors of Hitler's Will? The Goldhagen Controversy, Political Analysis and the Holocaust

Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) has won its author a succession of accolades, from the American Political Science Association's prestigious Gabriel A. Almond Prize in comparative politics in 1994 to the even more prestigious Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik's Democracy Prize (awarded last in 1990). It has also occasioned an unprecedented and intense controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article I consider the attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust in the Goldhagen thesis and the controversy this has spawned. I argue that despite Goldhagen's efforts to restore the conscious human subject to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the logic of his thesis in fact serves largely to absolve German subjects of culpability for an act of barbarism he regards as at least latent in an 'exceptional' and 'eliminationist' anti-Semitism that predates the rise of fascism. I take issue with Goldhagen's identification of Hitler's willing executioners as 'Germans', arguing that if human subjects are to be restored to the analysis of the Holocaust (as, indeed, they should be), it is imperative that we acknowledge the distinctly unexceptional character of 'Ordinary Germans' and, consequently re-examine our own culpability in this most modern of atrocities.