Book reviews

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Instructions From the Centre. Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975-1985 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), 238pp.

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (eds.), More 'Instructions from the Centre': Top Secret Files on KGB Global Operations, 1975-1985 Intelligence and National Security (London, Frank Cass) 130pp. £24 hb.

Gunnar Skogmar, Nuclear Triangle: Relations between the United States, Great Britain and France in the Atomic Energy Field 1939-50 (Copenhagen, Political Studies Press, 1993), 240pp.

K.S. Sandhu, Sharon Siddique, Chandran Jeshurun, Ananda Rajah, Joseph L.H. Tan, Pushpa Thambipillai (eds.), The ASEAN Reader (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), xxvi + 582pp. S$58/ US$39.90 (soft cover); S$89/US$59.90 (hard cover). ISBN 981-981-3016-41-8 (soft cover), 981-3016-42-6 (hard cover).     

The committee outlier debate: A review and a reexamination of some of the evidence

An ongoing and controversial topic of congressional scholars is the question “Are committees ‘preference outliers’ vis-a-vis their parent chamber?” Despite numerous research efforts showing isolated cases of outlying committees, little evidence shows a systematic tendency for committees to be unrepresentative of their legislature. A paper which comes close to being an exception is Weingast and Marshall's (1988) analysis of “the industrial organization of Congress,” which reports evidence of many and very strongly outlying committees. However, the apparently strong evidence is due more to the authors' incorrectly executed methods than to a general tendency for committees to be outliers. In this note I review the state of the committee-outlier debate and also show that Weingast and Marshall's empirical results cannot be replicated. I accordingly provide the correct results once their statistical tests are properly executed.     

Reviews

Timothy J. Colton & Robert C. Tucker (eds), Patterns in Post‐Soviet Leadership. Boulder, San Francisco & Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, ix + 245 pp., £40.95 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Jeremy Lester, Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle for Hegemony in Russia. London & New York: Verso, 1995, xiii + 307 pp., £34.95 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Robert W. Orttung, From Leningrad to St Petersburg: Democratisation in a Russian City. Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Press, xiii + 332 pp., £33.50 h/b.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr & Jeffrey Paul (eds), Liberalism and the Economic Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, xv + 319 pp., £16.95.

Mario I. Blejer & Fabrizio Coricelli, The Making of Economic Reform in Eastern Europe: Conversations with Leading Reformers in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, v + 156 pp., £35.00.

George Blazyca & Janusz Dabrowski (eds), Monitoring Economic Transition: The Polish Case. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, xiii + 175 pp., £30.00.

Laszlo Csaba, The Capitalist Revolution in Eastern Europe: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Systemic Change. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, x + 342 pp., £49.95

Robert V. Daniels, Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse. Lexington Mass., Toronto: D.C. Heath, 1995, xxviii + 387 pp., No price.

David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb, London: Penguin Books, 1994, xii + 586 pp., £7.99.

Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime. London: Macmillan, 1995, xiv + 277 pp., £40.00.

Janusz Bugajski, Nations in Turmoil: Conflict and Cooperation in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, xiv + 265 pp., £44.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Dennis P. Hupchick, Culture and History in Eastern Europe. London: Macmillan, 1994, xvii + 226 pp., £24.00.

David Kirby, The Baltic World 1772–1993. Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London and New York: Longman, 1995, viii + 472 pp., £16.99.

Payam Akhavan & Robert Howse (eds), Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: Reflections by Scholars from the Region. Washington: The Brookings Institution, and Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995, xxviii + 188 pp., £25.75 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

Sabrina Petra Ramet & Ljubi?a S. Adamovich (eds), Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, x + 502 pp., £37.00.

Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945–1990. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995, xvi + 443 pp., £42.50 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995, xvii + 340 pp., £35.00.

Tom J. Winnifrith, Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments. London: Duckworth, 1995, 171 pp., £20.00

Milenko Karanovich, The Development of Education in Serbia and Emergence of Its Intelligentsia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, x + 270 pp., £25.00.

James Dingley & Arnold McMillin (eds), Occasional Papers in Belarusian Studies. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1995, viii + 73 pp., No price.

Christopher Smart, The Imagery of Soviet Foreign Policy and the Collapse of the Russian Empire. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995, 180 pp., £47.95.

Hafeez Malik, Soviet‐Pakistan Relations and Post‐Soviet Dynamics. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994, x + 383 pp., £47.50.

Theodore Taranovski (ed. and trans.), with the assistance of Peggy McInerny, Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? Washington, DC, and Cambridge, England: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995, xiii + 436 pp., £40.00.

Leo Schelbert & Nick Ceh (eds), Essays in Russian and East European History: Festschrift in Honor of Edward C. Thaden. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, v + 252 pp., $45.00.

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Collected Writings 1947–1994. Los Angeles: Charles Schlacks, Jnr, 1994; vii + 312 pp., $39.95.

Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 469 pp., £35.00.     

For the People, Of the People and By the Military: The Regime Structure of Modern Turkey

The arrival, and subsequent longevity, of the military in politics in much of the Middle East over the last 50 years or so has elicited considerable attention. This is, perhaps, particularly so in Turkey, where, since 1909, there has been only 10 years in which a fully civilian administration has governed. Recently, the collapse of the Kurdish Workers Party and the beginning of a process of constitutional amendment aimed at meeting EU accession criteria has sharpened the controversy over the role of the military in the Turkish polity. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by analysing the methods through which military rule has been perpetuated since the Second World War. Using the work of the sociologists Eric Nordlinger and Michael Mann, I argue that two succinct regime strategies are discernible. The first – semi-authoritarian incorporation – was deployed throughout Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s. Following the 1980 coup, however, it existed alongside a second method – autocratic militarism – which emerged in south-east Anatolia. Thus, the primary purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation for the structure of these strategies.     

The Future Use of Technology in Education and Learning in the Commonwealth

ABSTRACT

Modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have increasingly been used in education systems and for learning across the world over the last quarter of a century, and are frequently seen as being an important means of delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG4. However, rhetoric about their potential benefits has often led to uncritical adoption of inappropriate and costly technologies, that have not benefited the poorest and most marginalised. This contribution explores likely uses of such technologies in Commonwealth education systems in the future, and what needs to be done so that these do indeed benefit everyone, rather than just the privileged with access to the latest technologies. It begins with an overview of existing Commonwealth initiatives, and then explores how ICT use for learning throughout the life-cycle is likely to change over the next decade. The next section suggests how Commonwealth organisations can best support governments and citizens in ensuring equitable distribution of relevant learning opportunities and mitigating the negative aspects of technology use. In conclusion, it advocates for the need to focus especially on the poorest and most marginalised, and it highlights the challenges of a future in which machines and humans are ever more intertwined.     

Learning from Uncle Sam? Exploring U.S. Influences on British Crime Control Policy

This paper examines the idea of "policy transfer" in the arena of crime control. More specifically, it examines the influence of the United States on recent criminal justice and penal policy developments in Britain. Three policy areas are discussed: privatized corrections, "zero-tolerance" policing, and "three-strikes" sentencing. Changes in these areas are widely perceived as being strongly influenced by developments in the U.S., although there has yet to be a systematic empirical study of how and why these policy developments occurred. Drawing on a review of literature, this paper examines the plausibility of the idea of policy transfer and highlights distinct routes through which policy transfer may occur between jurisdictions. It uses Bennett's (1991) model of "policy convergence" as a framework for exploring how "emulation,""elite-networking,""harmonization," and "penetration" might have been relevant to policy changes in these areas. Finally, the paper considers how the concept of policy transfer in criminal justice and penal policy might be further examined empirically.