Reviews

Pekka Sutela, Economic Thought and Economic Reform in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 197 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Stephen White, Gorbachev and After. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, ix+310 pp., £27.95 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

Catherine Merridale & Chris Ward, eds, Perestroika. The Historical Perspective. London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1991, xiii+253 pp., £12.95 p/b.

Guy Standing, ed., The New Soviet Labour Market. In Search of Flexibility. Geneva: ILO, 1991, xiv+440 pp., SF45.00.

Leonard Geron, Soviet Foreign Economic Policy under Perestroika. London: Chatham House Papers, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Pinter Publishers, 1990, 126 pp., £19.50, h/b, £7.95 p/b.

Malcolm R. Hill, Soviet Advanced Manufacturing Technology and Western Export Controls. Aldershot: Avebury, 1991, xv+256 pp., £35.00.

Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post‐Stalinist Society, translated by K. and O. Forster. Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, xvii+483 pp., £22.50 p/b.

A. Kemp‐Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia 1928–39. London: Macmillan, 1991, vi + 338 pp., £45.00.

Jelena Milojkovic‐Djuric, Aspects of Soviet Culture: Voices of glasnosf, 1960–1990. New York: East European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1991, iv+190 pp., $29.00.

Landon Pearson, Children of Glasnost. Growing up Soviet. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1991, xv+505 pp., $16.95, p/b.

Robert Rand, Comrade Lawyer. Inside Soviet Justice in an Era of Reform. Oxford: Westview Press, 1991, x+166 pp., £9.50 p/b.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch & Richard Stites, eds, Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991, viii+344 pp., £22.50 h/b, £9.50 p/b.

Efraim Karsh, Soviet Policy towards Syria since 1970. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991, 229 pp.+index, £35.00.

Ronald D. Bachman, ed., Romania: A Country Study, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: US Library of Congress Federal Research Division, 1991, xxxvi+356 pp.     

Modern beliefs regarding medicinal plants in Estonia

The popularity of using herbal cures in twenty-first century Estonia has several reasons. Estonians are familiar with nature, and many collect berries, mushrooms, and potherbs. Herb collecting in general is a part of the local heritage. There are private enterprises in Estonia dealing with the cultivation and sale of herbs. Herbs can be bought from grocery stores, markets, and pharmacies. Even medical doctors can recommend herbal treatments for mild illnesses.

This article reviews which herbal beliefs are held among modern Estonians and how this fits with global trends characterized by a growing strive toward the natural lifestyle also evident in health behavior and an attitude toward pharmaceutical companies as businesses who prioritize income above welfare. We will analyze how herbal beliefs reflect people’s religious views, educational background, sex and age. The empirical base of the study consists of the responses of 1,205 randomly selected subjects, of whom 650 were interviewed face to face in six different areas of Estonia and 555 replied to a survey online. The core of the questionnaire consisted of opinions on ten general herbal beliefs. In addition, respondents were asked their opinions on natural and synthetic medicines and reasons for herbal healing effects.     

Evaluation of Theft,Lying, and Fighting in Adolescence

The nature of age and gender differences in the evaluation of three everyday immoral behaviors was analyzed with a 21-item questionnaire. The items included examples of theft, lying, and fighting expressed both as omissions and commissions, commissions further specified with positive motives, negative motives, duress, or provocation. Three age groups were included in the study: pre-adolescents, midadolescents, and late adolescents (N = 2594). The most important findings were that boys accepted all immoral acts better than girls, the immoral peak in midadolescence, the low differentiation between the different types of acts in preadolescence, and the flexible usage of different rationales in middle and late adolescence.     

‘Soft’ forms of direct democracy: Explaining the occurrence of referendum motions and advisory referendums in Finnish local government

This study investigates ‘soft’ forms of direct democracy and identifies factors that explain their occurrence. Soft direct democracy refers to non‐binding referendum motions and advisory referendums, which the literature on direct democracy has largely ignored. Strategic motives have dominated previous explanations of the occurrence of initiatives and referendums, but are less useful in exploring non‐binding procedures of direct democracy. The article distinguishes four types of factors – socio‐structural, party system, political support and learning – and tests hypotheses on their effects with sub‐national data from Finland. The data enable us to compare two different types of instruments – non‐binding referendum motions and advisory referendums – while controlling for many unobserved factors. The findings show that erosion of political support, participatory traditions and policy diffusion explain the occurrence of bottom‐up referendum motions, while the last two together with small population and party system factors predict the occurrence of advisory government‐initiated referendums.     

Defensive development,combative contradictions: towards an international political sociology of global militarism in Africa

ABSTRACT

Drawing on international political sociology, this article shows how the merger of development and security has become part of the ideational architecture that facilitates a new ‘feel-good’ militarism in Africa. Contemporary international reform efforts are designed to restrain military power in the name of development, democracy and civilian oversight, but also to strengthen the coercive capacities of African security institutions and make them more efficient in the global fight against violent extremism. Such defensive development efforts have implications for the historically problematic relationship of the African state with modern forms of organised force, reconfiguring and recalibrating relations and dynamics between the state, military forces and external actors. The article concludes that defensive development is fraught with combative contradictions and risks becoming the handmaiden not only of increased militaristic violence, but also of oppression and the restriction of freedom and democracy.     

Marriages among people with disabilities in 19th-century Sweden: marital age and spouse’s characteristics

ABSTRACT

While marrying was an expected event in 19th-century Western society and has been subject to much historical research, there are few studies on how disabilities influenced people’s marriage patterns and spouse selection. The aim of this analysis is to contribute clarification on this issue by examining with whom disabled men and women married and the marital age and socio-demographic characteristics of them and their spouses. In total, 188 disabled individuals born in the first half of the 19th century and who married in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, are studied. The results reveal that disabled men and women did not marry each other, and they entered into marriage at a slightly higher age than the average, although there was usually no marked age gap between them and their spouse. Endogamous patterns were primarily found regarding the socio-spatial background of the two spouses. This analysis is one of the few studies identifying the marriages among a comparatively large number of disabled people using demographic data. Their participation in the partner pool highlight their agency historically and emphasize that disability did not lead to distance from social life in past society.     

Three Forms of Interpersonal Trust: Evidence from Swedish Municipalities

Social trust is usually treated as a dichotomy between particularized and generalized trust. In this article it is argued that a third distinct form, community trust, is neither particularized nor generalized and bounded in space rather than persons. Factor analysis of survey data from 33 Swedish municipalities (N = 6,453) distinguishes between particularized, generalized and community trust. Furthermore, regression analyses show that the three trust forms have partly distinct antecedents and linked to different types of behaviours. While generalized trust best predicts leaps of faith in relation to strangers, community trust is the only trust form significantly predicting taking part in local problem solving. Finally, multilevel analysis shows that community trust is the trust form most vulnerable to changes with respect to ethnic diversity and socioeconomic equality.     

Policy and Blame Attribution: Citizens’ Preferences,Policy Reputations,and Policy Surprises

Negativity bias suggests that the attribution of blame to governments, for alleged or actual policy failures, is disproportionately pertinent for their popularity. However, when citizens attribute blame for adverse consequences of a policy, does it make a difference which policy was it, and who was the political agent that adopted the policy? We posit that the level of blame citizens attribute to political agents for policy failures depends on three policy-oriented considerations: (1) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s established policy position; (2) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s concrete policy choice; and (3) the distance between the agent’s established policy position and her concrete policy choice. The inherent relationship between these three policy-oriented considerations renders their integration in one model a theoretical and methodological imperative. The model provides novel observable predictions regarding the conditions under which each of the three policy-oriented factors will produce either pronounced or subtle observable effects on blame attribution. We test the model’s predictions in two survey experiments, in Israel and in Germany. The results of both experiments are highly consistent with the model’s predictions. These finding offer an important contribution by specifying the ways in which individual-level preferences interact with politicians’ policy reputations and policy choices to shape blame attribution. Our model entails unintuitive revisions to several strands of the literature, and in the “Discussion” section we provide tentative support for the applicability of this model to other political judgments beyond blame attribution.