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.     

Physicians as gatekeepers: illness certification as a rationing device

Illness or disability is often used as an eligibility criterion by public programs that distribute money, services, privileges, and exemptions. Physicians then play a central role in the allocation process. But physicians are caught between a large pool of applicants who want some benefit, on the one hand, and an organization with limited resources to distribute, on the other hand. Three conflicts are engendered in this gatekeeping role: the tension between trusting and mistrusting information provided by the patient, the tension between erring on the false positive side and the false negative side in diagnostic decision-making, and the tension between doing everything possible for each patient and allocating limited resources among several needy clients. Several non-medical factors influence the ultimate outcome of this allocation process, which, in theory, rests on clinical decision-making: the specificity and restrictiveness of the formal definitions of illness and disability used by a program; the structure of the determination process; the overall policy of the organization on distribution of benefits; and the ability of the organization to use administrative review, direct incentives, and written standards to control the certifying behavior of physicians.     

Gender Equality (And its Absence) in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

With the dust settled after Singapore’s 2015 parliamentary elections, the only aspect pundits and Singaporean politics watchers could agree on was that the People’s Action Party’s comeback from its performance at the 2011 elections, although not of Lazarus proportions, was most certainly unexpected. While the result of the 2015 elections has gone through several post-election analytical mills, what has been oddly absent in such analyses is a discussion of gender in Singaporean politics. This article considers the relationship between gender and Singaporean politics through the experience of the 2015 election and its results. It shows that while Singapore has moved some way towards assuaging the demands of liberal feminists for greater representation in the political sphere, much more has to be done in order for gender equality to be achieved. The article argues for the Group Representation Constituency method of electing parliamentarians to be adapted to ensure a greater number of female parliamentarians while a quota system may be required for cabinet to be truly representative of the female demographic of Singapore.     

Information pathways into prison mental health care

Police and court liaison and diversion services provide important specialist mental health input along critical stages of the criminal justice pathway. Effective sharing of information between the services and relevant justice agencies is essential. However, various problems exist with the flow of information between agencies and services across the criminal justice pathway. This service evaluation explored how clinically relevant information is transferred, by drawing on the perspectives of prison health care staff in a large urban UK male prison. A qualitative service evaluation was conducted using semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 11 prison staff. The main themes included: gaps in the transfer of essential information, (particularly concerning risk and offending information); information gathering to fill these gaps; the importance of professional relationships, information sharing between agencies; and information solutions. Improving information transfer across the criminal justice pathway could prevent treatment delays and ensure more timely mental health care in prison.     

Otherwise than Hospitality: A Disputation on the Relation of Ethics to Law and Politics

At a time of unprecedented migration and social displacement, following a century ravaged by war and hegemonic shift, the question of hospitality presents itself with unparalleled urgency. Taking his cue from Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitics, Jacques Derrida addressed this question by deliberating on the nature of the political obligation to the other person. Invoking the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this demand is first of all ethical, and unconditional. But Derrida was also acutely aware of the residual violence of the hospitable gesture, which always takes place in a scene of power. The resultant aporias at the heart of hospitality provoked debate between the two authors at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference, and this paper seeks to elucidate and elaborate on this encounter. At stake are the matters of the potential political forms of hospitality, whether it should always been striven for and, ultimately, how one can conceptually reconcile its ethics with its violence.

A stochastic model of the 2007 Russian Duma election

In this paper we consider the nature of local Nash equilibrium (LNE) for a model of the 2007 Duma election in Russia, using estimates of valence obtained from sociodemographic variables. We then extend this sociodemographic valence model by including institutional valences, the approval by voters of the various institutions, including the President, the Prime Minister, the State Duma and the Federation Council. We show by simulation that the vote maximizing LNE of this general stochastic model were not at the electoral origin. The dominant feature of the election was the influence of approval or disapproval of President Putin on each voter’s political choice.     

Judicial Review Without Rights: Some Problems for the Democratic Legitimacy of Structural Judicial Review

This article addresses an issue overlooked in most of the literatureon judicial review: the legitimacy of judicial review of a constitution'sfederal and structural provisions. Debates about the legitimacyof judicial review—at least as conducted throughout theCommonwealth—are usually focussed on rights. These debatesappear to assume that the power of courts like the AustralianHigh Court and the Canadian Supreme Court to interpret and enforcefederal and structural provisions is unproblematic. This articletests that assumption and concludes that those who hold democracy-basedobjections to constitutional rights should seriously reconsider,and perhaps oppose, federal and structural judicial review aswell.     

Organizational Characteristics and Funding Environments: A Study of a Population of United Way–Affiliated Nonprofits

This study examines a population of United Way–affiliated nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts (1) to test hypotheses generated by previous research on relationships between government funding and specific nonprofit organizational characteristics, (2) to compare differences in organizational characteristics between nonprofits receiving higher percentages of revenues from the United Way and from government sources, and (3) to explore associations between government funding and United Way and underexamined characteristics, including use of commercial income and racial diversity of organizational membership. The study supports previous research on the relationship between government funding and nonprofit characteristics, with one notable exception—less administrative complexity was associated with higher percentages of government funding. The study also finds differences in organizational characteristics between nonprofits with higher proportions of government funding and those with higher percentages of United Way funding, including organization size, number of board members, administrative complexity, use of volunteers, and the racial diversity of boards, staff, and volunteers.     

Non-Governmental Policy Transfer: The Strategies of Independent Policy Institutes

Discussions of policy transfer have primarily focused on official actors and networks. The non-governmental mode of policy transfer via foundations, think tanks and non-governmental organizations is a relatively neglected dimension. Accordingly, this paper addresses the role of think tanks in promoting the spread of policy ideas about privatization. The importance of think tanks to policy transfer is their ability to diffuse ideas by (1) acting as a clearing-house for information; (2) their involvement in the advocacy of ideas; (3) their involvement in domestic and transnational policy networks; and (4) their intellectual and scholarly base providing expertise on specialized policy issues. Concepts from comparative public policy and international relations such as "social learning" and "epistemic communities" are used to outline the way think tanks advocate innovative policy ideas. However, not only have think tanks been effective in promoting the transfer of policy ideas, the international spread of think tanks also exhibits organizationaltransfer.