Book reviews

Ennio Di Nolfo (ed.), Power in Europe?II. Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy and the Origins of the EEC, 1952-1957. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), DM238.

Simon J. Nuttall, European Political Cooperation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 343pp. £30, ISBN 0 19 827318 5.

Michael Smith and Stephen Woolcock, The United States and the European Community in a Transformed World (London: Pinter publishers for Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1993), 120 pp., £22.50 hb, £9.95 pb. ISBN 086187 0972/086187 0980.

Richard H. Ullman, Securing Europe (London: Adamantine Press, 1991), 175pp., £12.95. ISBN 0 7449 0036 0.

Cornelia Navari (ed.), The Condition of States: A Study in International Political Theory (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 238pp.

Francine Friedman, (comp. and ed.) Yugoslavia: A Comprehensive English-Language Bibliography (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1993), xv + 547 pp., indices, US$ 120.

Richard Dean Burns (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), three vols., 1692 pp. inch index, US$280, ISBN 0 684 19281 0.     

Social Norms and the Paradox of Elections’ Turnout

People vote although their marginal gain from voting is zero.We contribute to the resolution of this paradox by presentinga model for equilibrium configuration of attitudes regardingthe decision to vote. Each individual is seen as an element ofa social network, within which pairs of individuals expressideas and attitudes, exerting mutual influence. We model therole of such networks in propagating the mutual influenceacross pairs of individuals. We show that it may suffice thata small set of individuals have a strong feeling about showingup to vote to generate a significant turnout in elections.     

The Criminalization of Aliens: Regulating Foreigners

Intergroup contact and conflict is inevitable in the context of global economic competition and geopolitical interests. Immigrant and migratory groups have particularly been subjected to unequal treatment by members of dominant host groups, generally as a means of promoting and protecting their own economic and political interests. Immigrants often serve as a dependent and secondary labor force, useful within fluctuating cycles of labor shortage, economic crises, and economic prosperity. Likewise, criminalization is one tool that perpetuates notions of “otherness,” which in turn maintains immigrant minorities as a secondary labor force; and justifies penal punishment of them. For instance, in the United States, Chicanos and Mexican immigrants have been exploited as secondary labor, and have also been more likely than many other groups to be swept up in the Criminal Justice System. Drawing on neo-Marxist perspectives and postcolonial notions of “otherness”, this paper examines the relationship between incarceration of foreigners and economic conditions, economic threat, population change, and otherness. As hypothesized, country level data suggests that factors such as a free market economy, population change, economic competition, and a concentration of immigrants in the population are related to the level of imprisonment of foreigners. Implications for further research are also discussed.