Reviews

Rosalinde Sartorti, Pressefotografie und Industrialisierung in der Sowjetunion. Die Pravda 1925–33. Berlin and Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. 1981. 339 pp. 58 DM.

P. G. Hare, H. K. Radice and N. Swain (eds.), Hungary: A Decade of Economic Reform. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. xiv+257 pp. £15.00.

Philip Hanson, Trade and Technology in Soviet‐ Western Relations. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981. xiv + 271 pp. £20.

Peter Wiles (ed.), The New Communist Third World. London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982. 392 pp. £15.95.

Arthur J. Klinghoffer: The Angolan War: a study in Soviet policy in the Third World. Colorado: Westview Press Inc., 1980. viii + 229 pp. $22.50.

Morris Rothenberg: The USSR and Africa: new dimensions of Soviet global power. Washington: Advanced International Studies Institute, 1980. viii + 280 pp. $8.95 and $ 12.95.

Seweryn Bialer (ed.), The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy. Studies of the Research Institute on International Change, Columbia University. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press/London: Croom Helm, 1981. xviii + 441 pp. £14.95.

Igor Birman, Secret incomes of the Soviet state budget. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. 313 pp. DFL. 180.00, US $78.50.

James R. Millar, The ABCs of Soviet Socialism. University of Illinois Press, 1981. xvi + 215 pp. £8.72 paperback.

Adam B. Ulam, Russia's Failed Revolutions: from the Decembrists to the Dissidents. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981. vii + 453 pp. £10.00.

Richard B. Day, The ‘Crisis’ and the ‘Crash’: Soviet Studies of the West, (1917–1939). London: NLB, 1981. x + 300 pp. £9.50.

Bogdan Szajkowski (ed.), Marxist Governments: A World Survey, 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1981. xix + 822 pp. £20 per volume, £50 the set.

Thomas Remeikis, Opposition to Soviet Rule in Lithuania 1945–1980. Chicago: Institute of Lithuanian Studies Press, 1980. 680 pp. $15.00.     

Capitalism,uneven and combined development and the transhistoric

What is the status of Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development within Marxist theory and how might it be fruitfully employed by Marxists in international relations? Is uneven and combined development a transhistoric general abstraction or does it need rooting in the relations, processes, tendencies and counter-tendencies of a particular mode of production? This article rejects Justin Rosenberg's recently drawn conclusion that uneven and combined development is usefully understood as a transhistoric general abstraction that potentially offers the basis of a transhistoric theory of the international. Instead it questions the value of transhistoric categories for Marxist theory and pursues the argument that uneven and combined development is best understood within the relations, processes and tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, arguing that capitalist social relations and political forms are historically unique in their capacity to generate both combination and unevenness.     

Whose lives are worth more? Politicising research safety in developing countries

This article develops the ‘safety–emotion–power’ nexus and highlights the role of emotion in research by politicising the unequal power relationships between researchers and NGO staff members in defining danger and negotiating safety in their fieldwork. Drawing on the author's research experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, it argues that research touching on emotion-laden topics can inflict stress and pain on NGO staff members and their families. The ‘right to safety’ of NGO staff members is often compromised by researchers' ‘right to know’. The norms of conflict-avoidance also deter NGO staff members from negotiating safety. In addressing these issues, the article suggests three principles for taking account of emotional aspects of safety in research ethics.     

Too much choice,too little impact: a multilevel analysis of the contextual determinants of preference voting

Abstract

Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.     

The Quality of Representation and Satisfaction with Democracy: The Consequences of Citizen-Elite Policy and Process Congruence

Citizen-elite congruence has long been considered an important yardstick for the quality of democracy. The literature on citizen satisfaction with democracy, however, has reduced congruence almost exclusively to one of its components, policy congruence. Just as citizens are considered to have positions on policy issues, there is growing scholarly interest in the preferences they have about the process of representation. Yet studies inquiring into the impact of the divergent preferences that citizens and elites have regarding the representational process thus far have been few and their results inconclusive. Combining new, unique data from the 2014 Belgian Election and Candidate Studies, we seek to address this lacuna. Our findings indicate that we cannot understand citizen satisfaction without also taking process into account—even as the policy gap has the greater effect. They should be of interest to scholars of democracy, those concerned about citizen disengagement from politics, and political practitioners.     

The medical licensing examination debate

National licensing examinations are typically large‐scale examinations taken early in a career or near the point of graduation, and, importantly, success is required to subsequently be able to practice. They are becoming increasingly popular as a method of quality assurance in the medical workforce, but debate about their contribution to patient safety and the improvement of healthcare outcomes continues. A systematic review of the national licensing examination literature demonstrates that there is disagreement between assessment experts about the strengths and challenges of licensing examinations. This is characterized by a trans‐Atlantic divide between the dominance of psychometric reliability assurance in North America and the wider interpretations of validity, to include consequences, in Europe. We conclude that the debate might benefit from refocusing to what a national licensing examination should assess: to achieve a balance between assessing a breadth of skills and the capacity for such skills in practice, and focusing less on reproducibility.     

Exploring host perspectives towards younger international development volunteers

Research on international development volunteering has increased significantly in recent decades, but there is a need for greater depth of understanding in relation to host communities. This article examines the impact of younger volunteers from the perspectives of host community members, evaluating the positive and negative aspects in working with young people from the “UniVol” programme of Volunteer Service Abroad, New Zealand. It argues that further insights into host community experiences can play a key role in enhancing youth IDV volunteering, creating assignments that are more beneficial for hosts, and moving away from neo-liberal “volunteer-centric” youth volunteering.     

Contesting ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ difference in emotions through music use in the UK

This article builds on social psychological critiques of ‘hardwired’ gender difference in emotions, looking at the topic through the emotional use of music. Starting from the premise that gender differences in emotion are socially and discursively constructed rather than innate, it moves on to challenge existing work in which masculinity and femininity are treated as singular, oppositional concepts, that are ‘normally’ attached to ideas of existing sex differences. Drawing on data, generated from a UK-based online survey of 914 respondents (male = 361; female = 553), this article highlights that whilst gender plays a significant part in shaping the emotional experience of music, this is often mediated heavily by age and personal experience. It suggests that music is a practical means of moving beyond ideas of differences in gender or sex differences in emotional display, towards ideas of diversity, especially given that existing face-to-face research has often found men to be ‘unable’ to communicate emotional experience in particular ways. Both inductive quantitative trends and open-ended fragments from people's emotional experiences of music are included in order to demonstrate how emotions and gender intersect discursively.     

Post-motivational Progression and the Possibility of Aborting Protracted Crime

The idea for this article emerged from a cursory examination of the National Crime Victimization Survey (US Department of Justice, 1997–2004). Unbeknownst to the authors (and possibly to most of the readers) is a trend confirming that about 2/3 of all violent crimes in the United States end up as attempted crimes, as opposed to completed crimes. Equally intriguing is that international crime figures confirm, almost exactly, the US Survey statistics. If these figures are accurate, then criminologists and crime control agents should ask the question: if 2/3 of all violent crimes fail to materialize—for whatever reason—under their own weight, why cannot criminologists and crime control agents in the future develop a clinical competency that can exploit this failure and further reduce the completion rate of violent crime to technically zero? If that can be accomplished, then violent crimes can theoretically be aborted. Such a futuristic design should not be considered farfetched in light of the current advancements in today’s technology, including the military practice of laser-bombing a car speeding on the road several miles below, or the on going military testing of “shooting a missile with a missile”. This article focuses on the undiscovered, yet enormous, role of post-motivational criminology, which—when the desired clinical competency is developed—can literally change the trajectory of violent crimes and possibly abort them in progress. While this article cannot promise answers for the next decades, it can, at least, stimulate the criminological community to think beyond its traditional boundaries and to engage in quantum research consortiums that can study the dynamics of post-motivational progressions and eventually resolve why some bullets miss or can intentionally be made not to hit.     

Pushing the Boundary: are Reality TV Shows Ruffling Feathers in Africa?

The article addresses the viability of Reality TV shows in Africa. It weighs this against the continent’s much acclaimed conservatism. It identifies key differences within African philosophical traditions that could militate against the tenets of this genre. It concludes that the trend towards presenting TV formats where individuals and families are exposed to ridicule and contempt, berated for dysfunctional activities or where homosexuality, incest, infidelity, strange fetishes, or transvestism are discussed, has the tendency to collide directly or indirectly with competing African moral frameworks and could prove polarizing in the African setting.