Reviews

Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, xx + 401 pp., £40.00.

Hugh Macdonald, The Soviet Challenge and the Structure of European Security. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990, ix + 318 pp., £38.50.

Jonathan Eyal, ed. The Warsaw Pact and the Balkans: Moscow's Southern Flank. London: Macmillan Press, 1989, xvi + 246 pp., £35.00.

Kurt M. Campbell & S. Neil MacFarlane, eds., Gorbachev's Third World Dilemmas. London & New York: Routledge, 1989, xvi + 270 pp., £35.00.

Terry L. Thompson, Ideology and Policy: The Political Uses of Doctrine in the Soviet Union. London: Westview Press, Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989, viii + 220 pp., $28.95 p/b.

Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 266 pp., £9.95 p/b.

Maria Lo?, ed., The Second Economy in Marxist States. London: Macmillan, 1990, xiv + 240 pp., £37.50.

Harley D. Balzer, Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989, xxi + 290 pp., $32.50.

Michael Ryan, Doctors and the State in the Soviet Union. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989, ix + 205 pp., £37.50.

Jerzy Tomaszewski, The Socialist Regimes of East Central Europe: Their Establishment and Consolidation 1944–67, Trans. Jolanta Krauze. London: Routledge, 1989, 305 pp., £40.00.

Paul G. Lewis, Political Authority and Party Secretaries in Poland 1975–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, xix + 340 pp., £35.00.

Leonard J. Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power in Yugoslavia. Oakville, TX: Mosaic Press, 1989, 499 pp., $29.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.

Diane P. Koenker & William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, xix + 393 pp., $39.50.     

The Paradox of the State-Run Media Promoting Poor Governance in China: Case Studies of a Party Newspaper and an Anticorruption Film

ABSTRACT

This essay draws on the analysis of media texts and ethnographic fieldwork to present case studies of the production, distribution, and consumption of two kinds of media products in China that are used for educating cadres about official policies, law and morality, namely, a Party-produced prefectural newspaper and an anticorruption film. Such pedagogic media products merit study because they are consumed by a huge audience of cadres who are entrusted with interpreting and implementing state policy and with carrying out the daily work of the different institutions that make up the Party-state. The case studies show that the internal circulation of pedagogic media products within the Party-state apparatus works in two ways to reinforce “organizational involution,” which causes poor governance. First, the content of the media products and their methods of distribution buttress the norms and institutional practices that entrench unchallenged power, corruption, and official malfeasance within the system. Examples include the role of top-down administrative fiat in determining the content of the media products and the ways in which individuals and institutions are compelled to purchase materials and participate in pedagogic activities to secure their positions. Second, state pedagogy deflects attention away from the structural failings of the Party-state system. The pedagogic products enable the Party-state to portray itself as the leading crusader in the fight against corruption, despite the corrupting consequences of its continuing unsupervised monopoly on power. Meanwhile, self-improvement exhortations in the media texts sidestep the question of systemic political reform.     

Government lawyers and the training of senior civil servants. Maintaining law at the heart of the French state

To assess the influence of law and jurists in the conduct of contemporary French state, this article examines the role of the Council of State at ENA (École Nationale d'Administration), the main school for top civil servants. Although the study reveals the decreasing part of law in the bureaucratic capital over the past fifty years, it also shows how government lawyers have resisted this downsizing process. The teaching of a subject called ‘legistics’ provides top officials with a different view of law. Dedicated to promoting the political utility of law, legistics complies with managerial values while it sticks to the Weberian model of bureaucracy. As a result of the introduction of legistics, new techniques of legal drafting have been spreading within French public administration. Legistics thus plays a role in the contemporary reshaping of public legal practices, as well as in the renewing of legal legitimacy in the reform of public affairs.     

Support for the environment post-transition? Material concerns and policy tradeoffs

Though many individuals are aware of the need to address environmental concerns, fewer are willing to pay for climate action or think the environment should be a priority for government spending. One compelling reason is that they prioritize using scarce resources to address immediate material concerns. This is particularly likely for individuals facing absolute material scarcity or for those who think they are relatively economically worse off, especially in contexts characterized by rapid transformation and volatility in the levels and quality of social welfare provision. To test these expectations, we analyze survey data from formerly Communist economies, which today find themselves with vastly different fortunes. Empirical findings suggest that absolute and relative material scarcity affect opinions regarding government spending on, and the willingness to pay more for, environmental action. However, willingness to pay more for government public services, inclusive of anti-poverty initiatives, has an impact on willingness to pay more for climate action, but in counter-intuitive ways. Overall, the results appear to suggest that explicitly addressing and relating individual living standards and inequality with environmental concerns may expand support for climate action.     

The Transformative Impact of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping

ABSTRACT

Civilians, working together, and using non-violence to protect themselves and others from direct violence, challenges widespread assumptions that peace and protection can only be delivered by the military and with the threat of force. Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (UCP), with 35 years of evidence from projects worldwide, demonstrates that the assumption that an armed actor will not yield to anything except a weapon is false, therefore, challenging the exclusive role of military in peacekeeping. This paper explores (i) by conceptualising UCP as part of peacekeeping new insights into the approaches and mechanisms for preventing violence are revealed, (ii) the transformative capacity of UCP though the relationship with nonviolence theory. Using evidence from the practice of UCP from the organisations involved (including Peace Brigades International and Nonviolent Peaceforce) this paper sets out how we can create different approaches to peacekeeping.     

Mock-juror reactions to multiple interview presentation and rapport-building

ABSTRACT

In the UK and some US states, video-recorded investigative interviews of child victims/witnesses can be presented in court as the child’s evidence-in-chief. However, there is scarce advice or research on the effect that presenting different sections of the interviews may have on juror perceptions of the child’s testimony. Two aspects of testimony presentation are examined here: first, whether to show the rapport-building phase of the interview, and second, the presentation of multiple interviews (i.e. more than one interview with the same child). Participants (n?=?103) informed they were watching two interviews of the same child separated by a week had more positive perceptions of the child’s testimony than those informed they were watching just one extended interview with a ten-minute break. Also, those watching the rapport-building phase had less positive perceptions of the child’s testimony than those who did not watch this phase. Participants’ perceptions of the interviewer and their case progression decisions were mainly not related to the above presentational differences. Thus, (i) mock-jurors were not inherently biased against multiple interviews and (ii) decisions regarding whether or not to show the rapport-building phase in court may have significant effects on jurors’ perceptions of the child and their testimony.     

The Changing Relationship Between Housing and Inequality, 1980–2010

Inequality in both income and wealth has grown rapidly in the United States since the 1970s. Over the same period, homeownership rates increased in step with expansionist government policies and the development of subprime and other exotic loan products, and housing affordability challenges emerged as the most prevalent housing problem for owners and renters alike. The subprime lending and foreclosure crises of the 2000s stretched households financially, threatening the traditional economic benefits of homeownership, bringing into stark relief the ways in which housing and inequality mutually influence one another, and implicating homeownership, housing affordability, and subprime lending in the widening gap between the rich and the poor. This article examines the changing roles of homeownership, housing affordability, and subprime lending in contemporary U.S. inequality by, first, describing trends in county inequality and housing characteristics and, second, modeling inequality as a function of the previous decade's housing characteristics over the period of 1980–2010. We build upon past models of county inequality by more explicitly considering causal order, place characteristics, and state and regional fixed effects. The results confirm that homeownership, affordability, and subprime lending not only reflect existing inequalities but also perpetuate those inequalities over time. Homeownership promotes equality, affordability problems undermine it, and subprime lending has the potential to ameliorate inequality in certain contexts, but these effects shift significantly over time, particularly as a result of widespread foreclosures and economic recession. Our analysis establishes the importance of housing in explaining contemporary inequality, highlights how place characteristics and causal ordering may improve county inequality models, and provides a foundation for future studies examining inequality in light of the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis.