Reviews

Terry L. Thompson & Richard Sheldon, eds, Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988, xiii+290 pp., £21.00.

Michael Rywkin, Soviet Society Today. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1989, xii+243 pp., $35.00 h/b, $12.50 p/b.

David Lane, Soviet Society Under Perestroika, London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xv+401 pp., £40.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925–32. London: Macmillan, 1990, xv+328 pp., £47.50.

Roger Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics under the New Economic Policy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, xi+453 pp., £48.00.

Francois Heisbourg, ed., The Strategic Implications of Change in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan, 1990, vi+227pp., £40.00.

Neil Fodor, The Warsaw Treaty Organisation: a Political and Organizational Analysis. London: Macmillan, 1990, 235 pp., £40.00.

Gerald Segal, The Soviet Union and the Pacific. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xiii+236 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Philip S. Gillette & Willard C. Frank, Jr, eds, The Sources of Soviet Naval Conduct. Lexington, IN: Lexington Books, 1990, xvii+297 pp., $39.95.

Sylvia Woodby & Alfred B. Evans, Jr, eds, Restructuring Soviet Ideology: Gorbachev's New Thinking. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, 226 pp., £22.50.

Nikolai N. Petro, ed., Christianity and Russian Culture in Soviet Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, xi+244pp., £17.95 p/b.

David A. Dyker, Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt. London: Routledge, 1990, xi+201 pp., £30.00.

Agnes Heller & Ferenc Fehér, From Yalta to Glasnost. The Dismantling of Stalin's Empire. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, viii+288 pp., £35.00.

Elemer Hankiss, East European Alternatives. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, xiv+319 pp., £35.00.

George Blazyca & Ryszard Rapacki, eds, Poland into the 1990s: Economy and Society in Transition. London: Pinter, 1991, x+148 pp., £27.50.

Michael D. Kennedy, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland: A Critical Sociology of Soviet‐Type Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, xiv+421 pp., £45.00, $59.50.

Graham Smith, ed., The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union. London: Longman, 1990, x+389 pp., £22.50 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

James Muckle, Portrait of Soviet School under Glasnost. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1990, ix+205 pp., £35.00.

Piers Beirne, ed., Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory, 1917–1938. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990, xiii+202 pp., $49.95.

Richard M. Connaughton, The Republic of the Ushakovka: Admiral Kolchak and the Allied Intervention in Siberia, 1918–20. London: Routledge, 1990, ix+193 pp., £30.00.

Vitaut Kipel & Zora Kipel, eds, Byelorussian Statehood—Reader and Bibliography. New York: Byelorussian Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1988, 398 pp.     

Social science and the Courts

Social scientists have increasingly become involved in the submission of amicus curiae or friend of the court briefs in legal cases being decided by state and federal courts. This increase has triggered considerable debate about the use of briefs to communicate relevant social science research. This article evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of various methods of summarizing social science research for the courts. It also reviews the procedures for submitting briefs developed by the American Psychology-Law Society which, in collaboration with the American Psychological Association, has submitted its first brief inMaryland v. Craig, a case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.The authors wish to thank James Ogloff, Kathy Roesch, and Claudia Worrell for their comments on an earlier draft     

Child witnesses and the confrontation clause

InMaryland v. Craig, the United States Supreme Court relied heavily on a brief prepared by a committee of the American Psychology-Law Society on behalf of the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA brief concluded that sexually abused children may be particularly vulnerable to distress in the legal process, especially when forced to confront the defendant face to face, and that such acute distress may be inconsistent with the state's interests in promotion of reliable testimony and child welfare. APA also argued that psychological theory and research provide foundations for individualized determination of the need for measures to protect children from face-to-face confrontation. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AFE06051 00002     

The relationship of abuse and witnessing violence on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory with black adolescents

A number of social and psychological factors present in most adolescent parents place them at high risk for abusive behavior toward their children. However, current child abuse potential measures do not include adolescent samples as part of the psychometric data base. Consequently, the purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to investigate whether a Black adolescent sample would perform differently than an adult nonabusing sample on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP), and (2) to examine the relationship between history of abuse or witnessing violence to scores on the CAP. Results revealed that Black adolescents scored significantly higher than the adult normative sample on the CAP; consequently, cutoff scores need to be empirically established for adolescents. Additional analyses indicated that a history of abuse, as well as a history of witnessing violence, are associated with a high potential for abuse.     

Circumventing formal structure through commitment: Presidential influence and agenda control

Although the formal institutional structure that defines the temporal order of play in a policy game between the Congress and President ought to provide Congress with agenda power, the President is traditionally treated as the dominant player in this relationship. We show that if the President can make clear-cut commitments, presidential commitment can counter the dominance hierarchy and the complexion of equilibrium outcomes. Thus, the details of political interactions (in particular, the possibilities for commitment) may be as important as the formal specification of institutional structure.We thank Peter Aranson, David Austen-Smith, Ed Campos, Gerry Faulhaber, Art Frank, Ken Koford, William Riker, Janet Pack, the anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Rochester for helpful comments, subject to the usual caveat. We also thank Joel Friedlander and Harold Dichter for research assistance.     

Competition in political and economic markets

Prepared as a response to Frey and Eichenberger's Anomalies in Political Economy. We thank Gordon Tullock for helpful discussions. This work was partially supported by the Taylor Experimental Laboratory at Washington University.     

Elections and government spending

It is widely believed that electoral pressures cause legislators to favor government spending programs. This electoral theory of spending is shown to encompass two core hypotheses: (1) the electoral consequences hypothesis, which states that support for spending programs improves the representative's electoral showing; and (2) the legislator insecurity hypothesis, which states that greater electoral insecurity leads representatives to be more in favor of spending programs. A test of these ideas using spending scores for U.S. representatives in 1986 finds that neither hypothesis is supported by the data.