Abstract
As Avant is quick to point out, it has long been assumed within the social sciences that modern states are the only institutions endowed with the requisite legitimacy to exercise physical force in the international sphere. In recent years, however, a few political scientists have started to dispute this enduring assumption, citing the (re-)emergence of private security companies as the main process responsible for eroding this traditional state monopoly. Avant's book, which sets out to explore how private security companies have transformed the institutional mechanisms for controlling violence, represents a significant contribution to this growing literature, in large part due to its original theoretical approach. She endeavours to distance herself from the ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ perspectives which often define private security debates, and instead attempts to construct a more analytically neutral framework. This involves drawing insights from both economic (rationalist) and sociological (constructivist) institutionalism to explore the political, social and functional mechanisms for controlling violence in varying types of private security contracts within both strong and weak states. This seemingly all-inclusive approach is mapped out in the opening two chapters and then applied in subsequent empirical chapters to nine different case studies, which range from the US and UK to Croatia and Sierra Leone and also extend to non-state actors such as multinational corporations and international non-governmental organisations.
This ambitious analytical framework demands a skilled exploration, which Avant consistently delivers. Her discussion in the empirical and later evaluative chapters is thoroughly researched and successfully demonstrates the trade-offs inherent within the process of privatising international security. For example, she emphasises throughout that while contracting private security services usually enhances a state's capacity to exercise force (functional control), it also inevitably blurs the institutional mechanisms by which violence is regulated (political control) and has unpredictable effects on the prevailing social norms governing the application of force (social control) – indeed, Avant's analysis suggests that these three aspects of control rarely, if ever, complement one another. Given the degree of complexity she uncovers, it is perhaps understandable that Avant generally avoids offering practical strategies for enhancing the institutional control of violence and often appears relatively ambivalent about the future role of private security in the international sphere. This is not problematic as such, especially since this neutrality is central to her innovative analysis, but it does serve to highlight the limitations of this book, which exposes many important issues yet offers little indication of the way forward.
Adam White
Attacks on diplomatic personnel are by no means peculiar to contemporary world politics and, as this book shows, the number of attacks against diplomatic personnel (according to official US figures) has declined in recent years. But Craig Barker's study of legal and non-legal regimes for the protection of diplomatic personnel raises interesting issues about the role both of diplomatic personnel and of diplomacy itself. This is a book written by an international lawyer and, as one might expect, much of the discussion focuses on the 1961 Vienna Convention for the Protection of Diplomatic Personnel and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, together with other legal attempts to provide protection for diplomats.
Barker begins with two questions: first, why are diplomats a target for attack and, second, in an era when others are also the victims of terrorism are they deserving of special consideration? On the first point, he seems undecided, arguing in the preface (p. xi) that since the attacks of 11 September 2001 there has been a shift from terrorist attacks on symbolic targets, such as diplomats, to ordinary citizens and infrastructure. And yet he repeatedly comes back to the ‘symbolic’ significance of diplomats, albeit defined in terms of function. Here, however, the key function is seen very much in state-centric terms: diplomats as representatives of national foreign policy and communication channels between states. This provides an answer to the second question: they need protection because they serve important functions. But, of course, they are also part of an increasingly complex systemic process that has its own rationale and significance and this poses the question as to what it is that is being at once attacked and protected: diplomats as government representatives or the idea and processes of diplomacy as an institution of world politics?
Readers will find this book valuable in providing a concise survey of a significant problem, including an informative overview of theories relating to the role and status of diplomats from ancient Greece and Rome onwards. Underpinning the discussion lies a dilemma: in an age when the functions of diplomacy are increasingly defined in terms of access to domestic constituencies enshrined in a preoccupation with ‘public’ diplomacy, the need for enhanced security threatens to turn diplomatic missions into bunkers insulated from those with whom engagement is seen as vital.
Brian Hocking
(University of Loughborough)
What is the place of trust in contemporary political life? Is distrust of government a positive or negative value? Cleary and Stokes attempt to answer both these questions through the empirical analysis of two Latin American cases: Mexico and Argentina. The hypotheses guiding their research are that ‘the political culture most supportive of democracy is not a political culture of trust, but a political culture of skepticism’, and that a ‘mature democratic community’ (p. xi) does not imply participation in civic associations, but institutional trust or accountability.
Scepticism is without question a key feature of current politics all around the world, and contributes to a democratic culture through the control and surveillance of governments exerted by society. But it is not an absolutely positive value, as the authors seem to maintain: the installation of a permanent suspicion may also be negative for the consolidation of democracy and institutional trust.
In order to prove their assumptions, Cleary and Stokes commit several methodological errors, which weaken the soundness of their arguments. For the Mexican case study they chose four sample states (Baja California Norte, Chihuahua, Michoacán and Puebla) while for the Argentinian one they selected three provinces (Buenos Aires, Misiones and Córdoba) and one district (Mar del Plata). This creates a certain arbitrary imbalance. The reason for excluding the two federal districts (México D. F. and Buenos Aires City), despite their unquestionable importance in political affairs, remains a mystery.
The extremely narrow samples chosen from two countries with an undeniable regional het-erogeneity restrict the scope of their conclusions. Furthermore, additional cases need to be considered to achieve the ambitious aim of testing the quality of democracy, as well as the historical context that encouraged the development of a sceptical political culture. Finally, the authors sometimes exhibit a tendency to force the evidence to fit their statements. For instance, by maintaining that ‘the only group activity that people in consolidated democratic regions engaged in more was playing soccer’ (p. 163), Cleary and Stokes minimise the intervention of Argentine society in civic associations, ignoring the phenomenon of asambleas barriales (neighbourhood assemblies) during the 2001 crisis, the abundance of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other forms of social mobilisation characteristic of contemporary Argentine society. In sum, the capricious selection of variables, the tendentious use of the data and the lack of information provided all impede the accomplishment of the authors’ goal.
María Inés Tato
(CONICET, University of Buenos Aires)
This is a sophisticated, historically grounded and theory-driven work of comparative politics that will be of interest to advanced students and scholars who seek to develop and apply concepts of rhetorical politics, legitimacy and justifiable power to the study of political development, or are interested in democratic-capitalist development in Central America. Cruz focuses attention on culture as an important variable in explaining differences in politics between these two neighbouring countries that share the same colonial beginnings. Cruz presents political regimes as grounded in normative schemes of arbitration that frame the imaginative possibilities for a democracy's success and shape the regime of arbitration to be effective or trouble plagued. The normative schemes are in turn grounded in a group's intersubjective understanding of its collective identity as a people, and, once articulated, may be deployed in the service of a country's advancement and in providing compelling reasons for pursuit of a course of action or political transformation. This intersubjective understanding entails a people's sense of its own virtues and practical competence, which its political leaders may call upon and whereby their sincerity, their actions in correspondence to their words, can be judged. The animating research question is, why is it that some countries succeed, while others fail to build effective democratic regimes of arbitration and engines of socio-economic growth, and the overall project is enhanced by Cruz's decision to focus attention not on disparate, unrelated political regimes where exogenous variables might be supposed at work, but on the historical paths to development of two regionally and civilisationally similar countries that have become archetypical opposites.
Cruz establishes that neither socio-economic progress nor political institutional competence – substantive and electoral principles of legitimation, respectively – need occur in any set sequence, but that both are embedded in and mediated by underlying cultural systems of normative scheming and the regime of arbitration of differences as it exists. Both the economy and political regime require governance, and the wellsprings of ungovernability in the case of Nicaragua are borne in its people's penchant for Manichean claims and explanations, while Costa Rica has proceeded along a course where, whenever faced with a critical juncture, the Ticos have discursively evoked and recreated their identity as a peaceful people whose democratic sensibility is their treasure to be preserved.
The presentation of historical material and arguments is well written and wide-ranging, despite its narrow regional focus, and the connections it establishes will fill a gap in the literature.
Gordon A. Babst
(Chapman University California)
This is the latest book in a series of texts by the Journal of Democracy. It is made up of a series of short articles that appeared in the journal between 1991 and 2006 which have the common theme of trying to identify the ‘best’ electoral system: which has the greatest chance of ensuring democracy in deeply divided societies? And which can establish ‘effective’ governance?
The book includes several seminal articles by authors promoting conflicting arguments. For example, Lijphart argues in three chapters in favour of proportional voting systems as a central step towards establishing his favoured system of a consociational democracy. Ethnic differences should be taken as a given, and an institutional mechanism should be devised to allow different groups to share power. Lijphart also stresses the role of other constitutional features, such as federalism and power sharing within the executive. Quade, however, acclaims plurality voting in single-member districts with the hope of encouraging a two-party system. This has the advantage of encouraging parties to move to the centre compared to ‘PR [which] re-creates divisions and proliferates parties’, he claims (p. 93). For Reilly, building on the work of David Horowitz, ‘electoral rules that promote reciprocal vote pooling, bargaining, and accommodation across group lines’ (p. 28) should be championed. The alternative vote system or single transferable vote system are attractive options, as they encourage parties to seek electoral support among rival groups, thus disarming extremism by encouraging cross-ethnic alliances. Gladdish, meanwhile, suggests that there is no one type of electoral system that suits all countries and contexts.
The utility of the text is to bring these diverse positions ‘under one roof’ in a way that is convenient and accessible for researchers and students of comparative constitutional systems. Indeed, the text weaves between contrasting arguments in a way that is analytically and argumentatively rich. Of course, since the collection only takes articles from one journal, this perhaps should not be considered a complete collection on the debate. However, it remains an accessible and comprehensive collection.
The compilation usefully grounds the key theoretical arguments with empirical evidence. Nine chapters are devoted to specific regional or country experiences, but all of the chapters bring useful, empirically grounded, analytical insights. Finally, by incorporating empirical case studies from geographically and temporally diverse contexts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Uruguay, Southern Africa and Israel, the collection illustrates the centrality of these research questions to political science and contemporary politics across time and space.
Toby James
(University of York)
Governing after Communism is a contribution towards understanding the way the crushed socialist political structures were replaced and how the new institutions work in conditions of different legacies and socio-cultural conditions. Central to this study is the ‘core executive’ that goes far beyond formal structures and involves ‘coordination in action’, which is so poorly addressed in relation to Central and Eastern Europe.
The countries analysed are Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Bulgaria, selected on grounds of dissimilarity of ‘structural conditions, actor constellation, and critical junctures’ (p. 23). The contributors state a descriptive ‘unashamedly empirical’ (p. 14) goal for their study, which is to ‘map’ the evolution of core executives over time and across space and thus aim to collect systematic qualitative and quantitative data. There is an explanatory goal as well, which is to unveil the effects of particular executive arrangements over policy outcomes, namely on the budgetary process.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part sets out the theoretical framework, where the executive is examined under eight analytic dimensions drawn up from mainstream Western scholarship. In the second part the empirical results are presented in single chapters for each country. The final part offers a comparison of country results, with a discussion of the implications for European governance.
The strength of this volume is the wide scope of the framework that touches upon a vast range of complementary aspects of government. Yet this broad exposure might also be seen as a weakness because of the difficulty of covering so many complex aspects in depth within such limited space. The ‘mapping’ goal is effectively accomplished, and it will also prove constructive to match the existing Western taxonomy with the political development of CEE countries. However, the explanatory power is quite feeble since the chapter on ‘Institutions and their Effects’ is quite short (pp. 233–48) and no causal relation is provided to the reader. This is why, at times, the overall impression about the book is of a bird's-eye view rather than an exhaustive analysis of the intricacies of the politics that lies at the root of these institutional developments.
Undoubtedly, this book is successful in the important task of clearing out the empirical terrain. In so doing, it raises a number of interesting questions about post-communist cabinets and institutions which the authors are steadily engaged in addressing in their future research.
Angela Movileanu
(University of Siena)
Technological development is transforming the way we are governed. Public policy now hinges upon the state's ability to manage vast amounts of information. The authors examine here how developed states are coping with this challenge. Their inquiry is partly theoretical: they seek to establish a more sophisticated understanding of the technical background of policy-making. But it is also partly prescriptive: they argue that many states are failing due to obstacles largely of their own making. The focus of the book is not so much government, but the relationship between government and IT corporations. Modern states pioneered information management systems, but are now increasingly, it seems, dependent on the private sector, as the complexity of modern technology demands the empowerment of ‘expertise’. This book also, therefore, demolishes the optimistic discourse on ‘the information society’ and emancipatory politics.
After a useful discussion of Weberian theory, the inquiry is set up in chapter 3 by comparing the performance of seven countries (UK, USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Canada) in information management. The criteria are qualitative, but credible and comprehensive. The general finding, established in the subsequent five chapters, is that where IT corporations have too much control over design and implementation, public information management systems work poorly. Officials need their own technical capacity, and they need to use it. The authors criticise neither competition (e.g. USA) nor corporatism (e.g. Japan), but rather monopolistic markets and a lack of activism by officials. Incidentally, the best-performing country is the Netherlands. The worst is the UK, where the market for government contracts is dominated by a very small number of firms, and government capacity has been seriously undermined by ‘new public management’ reforms.
Criticising ‘new public management’, in theory and practice, is actually one of the underlying aims of this book. The authors bide their time before delivering the killer blow in chapter 9, but it is worth the wait. As a work of both theory and empirical analysis, the book deserves the highest possible plaudits. The volume of primary research that has gone into its production is almost breathtaking, especially when you consider the novelty of the research design. Furthermore, the book also has practical implications. An afterword contains policy suggestions that are radical but entirely sensible. Highly recommended.
Craig Berry
(University of Sheffield)
Transitional justice, defined as the punishment of wrongdoers who supported or profited from fallen authoritarian regimes and the provision of various types of compensation for victims, is currently a hotly debated academic subject. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe has meant that this, along with lustration, remains a contentious political issue in the region. In Poland, for example, the negotiated character of the 1989 revolution and the subsequent electoral success of the post-communist left postponed the full opening of the security police archives until the 2005 election swung the country towards National Catholic-dominated governments. The theoretical, as well as the historical and comparative, aspects were discussed in Elster's slightly earlier companion volume Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (2004). Elster draws on this to establish his theoretical framework of endogenous and exogenous-inspired transitional justice frameworks for the current symposium. Ten generally excellent and thought-provoking chapter case studies provide a fine blend of theoretical consideration and empirical examination. Part II is devoted to Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries of Vichy France, Austria/Hungary, Denmark/Norway and Belgium/Holland; while Part III covers post-communist Eastern Europe, East Germany, Argentina/Chile and the experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
The post-Second World War studies confirm Elster's insight that the extent, depth and timescale of the initial purge of collaborators is contingent upon the nature of the fallen autocratic system, the motivation of the actors in control of the transitional justice process and also historical circumstances such as the onset of the Cold War, which halted meaningful de-Nazification in West Germany and Austria after 1949. The studies in Part II, notably Henri Rousso on France, but also the Latin American chapter, contain authoritative detail and mature historical reflection as well as penetrating insights on the general problems of transitional justice. The related balance between the success or failure of the initial purge and whether victims of the authoritarian system subsequently consider the demands of transitional justice to have been met satisfactorily also emerges. In view of this it is hardly surprising that the Offe and Poppe chapter on East Germany works much better in terms of specific coverage than Tucker's stimulating, although heavily theoretical, discussion of rectification and restitution issues in post-communist Eastern Europe. Contrasting ruptures with communism in 1989 and varied democratising evolutions subsequently have resulted in highly differentiated individual country experiences in coming to terms with the legacy of communism as well as different practices of lustration and criminal prosecution. These remain topics which still deserve full book length rather than individual chapter coverage.
George Sanford
(University of Bristol)
With this comprehensive and most informative monograph Leslie Holmes provides a valuable contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about corruption by, importantly, presenting a due comparative and detailed study of the phenomenon in the post-communist world. Combining enhanced thoughts on some of his recurring arguments and new empirical findings from five post-communist countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Russia and China), Holmes addresses three related theoretical hypotheses: the complex role of neoliberalism in pushing corruption; the similarly conductive role of post-communism; and, as a consequence of increasing corruption or reporting of it, a delegitimation process that might lead to a state crisis. Along these lines, the individual chapters deal with important questions which are (contrary claims notwithstanding) far from closed: the definition debate, patterns of post-communist corruption, problematic attempts at measuring corruption, impacts and causes of corruption and anti-corruption measures. Against these insights, lessons are drawn with regard to the three hypotheses and the more general thesis of a crisis of legitimacy in post-communist countries and elsewhere. It is important not to ignore the question mark in the book's title, as the author leaves the interrelatedness of rotten states, rotten societies and potential counter-mobilisation to further discussion, albeit with an optimistic note.
With a full chapter on anti-corruption measures in these post-communist countries and beyond, the book provides an overdue contribution on questions of corruption control that moves beyond hypothetical prescriptions. Regrettably, the various measures are listed somewhat randomly across time and cases, which limits insight into processes of change over time as well as a truly comparative discussion of potential advantages and drawbacks. Nevertheless, these examples are illustrative of the sheer range of possible and effected actions. It should also be noted that the analyses draw on data from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s which could not account for the more recent rise of authoritarianism, accompanied by an instrumentalisation of anti-corruption campaigns in Russia, the legitimacy crisis of a whistle-blowing government in Hungary or the disillusioning effects of international anti-corruption campaigning in many post-communist countries. It would be important and interesting to read the book and reconsider the arguments, especially those on strong states, crises and legitimacy, with these empirical developments in mind. Although not light reading, this book would best be read in parallel with, and as a continuation of, Holmes’ earlier book The End of Communist Power (1993), which deals with essentially the same aspects in late communist systems.
Diana Schmidt
(Research Centre for East European Studies, Bremen)
This book is the latest in a long line of publications by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). The central core of this project is a huge and ever-expanding data set derived from content analysis of the manifestos of a large number of parties in a large number of countries in every free election since 1945. This data set, laudably, is easily available and has been very widely used by scholars who are interested in different aspects of party competition and, in particular, crave time-series data on party policy positions in different countries. As such, the CMP is a very important enterprise within political science and any major new publication by the group is of inherent interest. The volume under review is very much what it says on the title page, an extension of the widely cited signature publication of the group, Mapping Policy Preferences I (hereafter MPPI) (Budge et al., 2001, Oxford University Press). MPPII is in no sense a second edition of MPPI, but rather the second volume in what is now a two-volume series. In terms of data, the accompanying CD-ROM adds the whole of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to the country coverage, and brings information on the countries already covered up to date. Scholars relying on the books’ CD-ROMs for their data need both books for the full data set; indeed, MPPII only makes complete intellectual sense for readers already familiar with MPPI.
So what is new in MPPII, apart from lots more important data? Substantively, this volume's focus is on the new CEE democracies, in relation to which any new data is an obvious boon. Methodologically, the focus is on a much deeper investigation of issues relating to the reliability and validity of the CMP data set as a whole, and on an evaluation of alternative techniques for doing essentially the same job, for example computational text analysis as opposed to the CMP's qualitative human text coding.
It is more fruitful to discuss the book's findings about the CEE countries having first considered the methodological issues. There is a fairly straightforward problem on the table here. The CMP is a huge enterprise. Thousands of party manifestos, written in scores of different languages, have been coded for many hundreds of parties in hundreds of elections. Funding all this from scratch today would undoubtedly be a multi-million-pound exercise well beyond the scope of most social science research councils. For each set of manifestos coded, the CMP had to find and train a native language coder; the coder then had to locate the appropriate documents and read them several times, before painstakingly coding each document, sentence by sentence. This needs to be sincerely appreciated before we note that, as a result of the scale of this enterprise, each document in the CMP data set is coded once, and once only, by a single coder. A direct consequence of this perfectly understandable situation is that CMP estimates of party policy positions come with no estimate of associated error. For example, when we look at the data, we find that some of the manifestos coded are but a few sentences long, while others are several thousand sentences long. Apart from pitying the reader of those long manifestos, we note as a general principle of scientific research that any estimate based on a much larger number of unbiased observations (and we all take lack of bias in the coding process as an article of faith) is likely to be more reliable than an estimate of the same thing based on a much smaller number of observations. Yet, while the number of coded sentences is indeed reported by the CMP, this does not appear in any practical application of this huge data resource – all estimates are reported as having equal value and no account is taken of potential errors in the data generation process. Using the CMP data set on the grounds of its apparently ‘unique’ virtue, the ability to ‘estimate differences between parties at any one point in time and changes in their policy positions between one election and the next’ (p. 3), the problem is obvious. How much of the measured difference is ‘signal’ and how much is measurement ‘noise'?
We do not know. But what we do know is that both the writing and the reading of manifestos are not deterministic. Several stochastic processes are involved, inherently generating uncertainty in any evaluation of any manifesto. Thus you and I, or even I and I on two different days of the week, could sincerely try to write a document summarising the same policy position. It would be a miracle, seriously spooky, if we produced documents that were utterly identical in every way. You and I (or I and I on two different days of the week) could sincerely try to code each one of a pile of documents in the same way but it would also be a miracle if we always achieved this. So, if we are to use some coding of a document as a measure of a policy position, the stochastic processes that are inevitably involved logically imply that this measure will be uncertain. There is nothing at all wrong with this. It is a fact of life, but a fact of life that must be taken into account when generating and using such data.
Given this problem, it is therefore most welcome that MPPII, for the first time in the long history of CMP publications, makes really serious efforts to address the problems of error and uncertainty in chapter 5 – by far the most sophisticated chapter in the book. The approach is one of many that could have been used and there will doubtless be future contributions in this area. What CMP does is to assume some particular models of party competition, and then in effect ‘smooth’ the data to fit these models, allowing some estimate of the likely errors involved. The findings are both useful and salutary for third-party users of the CMP data. The simulated errors, helpfully reported on a party-by-party basis in tables in chapter 5, are often quite large. Many of the apparent party ‘movements’ in the CMP data would not be statistically significant in these terms. Thus, discussing the case of the British Labour party's ‘lurch to the left in 1983 … the lurch is recorded in the CMP data. But it would not pass the two-times-error test … in a structured analysis with a black-or-white decision rule, one could make a case for no real change (beyond what might reasonably be attributed to error)’ (p. 97). In other words, one needs to supplement the CMP data with personal local knowledge of the case to infer that this policy shift was signal, not noise. Every future user of the CMP data should thus read this chapter very carefully indeed. There is no doubt that these data do generate a rich time series, as is often claimed, but the CMP now recognises that their time-series estimates do contain error and that many apparent party movements may not be statistically significant in the conventional sense. This is an important first step in the right direction.
For this reason alone, MPPII represents a huge advance, although strong claims are made elsewhere in the book which, in common with many other CMP publications, tend to make sweeping and unequivocal statements that do not exactly align with the thoughtful and conservative tenor of chapter 5. Indeed, the very first sentence of chapter 6 interprets chapter 5 as showing that ‘our measurements are generally reliable, so most differences can be taken as telling us something about real life politics’ (p. 106). Methodologically austere readers of the tables in chapter 5, however, are unlikely to come to the same conclusion.
A similar Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to reporting research findings can be seen in relation to the CEE countries. The first word of the title of the first chapter in MPPII ends with an exclamation mark: ‘Uniquely! Over-Time Mapping of Party Policy Movements in Central and Eastern Europe 1990–2003’ (p. 3). There is not the slightest doubt that the extension of the CMP's purview to the CEE countries is a very welcome development, but users of these data should also read this chapter very closely. The overall, sober, summary of an evaluation of the CMP's left–right scale in CEE countries is that ‘the most prudent conclusion to draw … is that it is not obviously wrong’ (p. 24). The reason for this caution is that many of the country discussions that precede it involve telling local stories to validate what might appear on the face of things to be surprising findings. It is a great pity that the methodological discussions of potential error in the CMP estimates did not come before the discussions of the new data on the CEE. We would then have known, faced with a surprising new finding, whether this finding could possibly be attributed to measurement error, or whether we need a local story to interpret it.
Overall, therefore, MPPII represents a huge advance over MPPI – in terms both of data coverage and of the sincere and thoughtful attempts in chapter 5 to assess issues of measurement error. For most scholars, of course, the main impact of MMPII will be as a milestone signalling the general release of a useful new data set. Indeed, an unfortunate feature of the CMP project's role in the profession is that most third-party users are interested only in the data, merely scanning the books on a need-to-know basis. This is a big mistake. The books, and in this regard especially MPPII, are required very careful reading for any professional scholar who intends to use the CMP data – it more or less amounts to professional negligence not to do this. Having carefully assessed the issues involved, scholars can then move forward in a much more informed and rigorous way to use what truly is a unique data set. For this important reason, MPPII is a major new publication for this very significant project.
Michael Laver
(New York University)
This book is the third addition to the ‘Journal of European Public Policy’ series. The series aims to compile high-quality edited works on public policy in Europe by drawing on past issues of the journal. As such, the content has previously been published in Journal of European Public Policy, Special Issue, 12 (5) (2005). The objective of this compilation is to clarify our understanding of policy convergence, its causes and conditions. To this end, Knill provides a selection of papers presented at a 2004 workshop, many of which draw on insights gained from a research project he coordinated (ENVIPOLCON).
The writings within this volume address both theoretical and empirical aspects of policy convergence and are aimed at ‘all students and scholars of the European Union, European politics, and international relations’ (p. ii). The papers by Knill, Holzinger and Knill and Lenschew et al. provide a good introduction to the theoretical content of the subject area: policy convergence is demarcated from related concepts such as policy transfer, diffusion and isomorphism, and different types and causes of policy convergence are highlighted. Furthermore, indicators and causal mechanisms of convergence are discussed and domestic factors that might impact on the adoption of policies by different countries are explored. The more empirical contributions examine policy convergence in various policy arenas. These include money laundering and genetically modified organisms (Drezner), central banking (Marcussen), regulatory impact assessment (Radaelli) and environmental policies (Busch and Jörgens; Albrecht and Arts). Of special interest is the overview of empirical studies on policy convergence by Heichel et al. who advocate four assessment categories as a way of structuring the disparate studies within this field. The book finishes with a critical commentary on the contributions by Andrew Jordan.
Throughout the volume the language of choice is one of positivism. There is frequent reference to hypotheses testing, the measurement of convergence and the identification and examination of dependent and independent variables. However, this choice seems to be rooted in a perceived need to be more ‘scientific’ rather than reflecting the authors’ actual conceptual stance. The contributions are of wide interest and provide a useful source of reference; they also draw attention to areas of convergence that require further exploration and remaining questions that need to be addressed.
Tobias Jung
(University of Edinburgh)
Democracy and Elections in Africa offers a rigorous investigation of 232 elections including 97 presidential and 135 parliamentary elections in 44 sub-Saharan African countries from 1989 to 2003. The assessment centres on ten indicators of democratic quality and freedom and fairness. The findings take issue with several orthodox views in a field dominated up to now by Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walles’ Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in a Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Lindberg's study is impressively sourced in both comparative theorising about democratisation and African studies.
The chief findings derive from examining electoral sequences, as follows: first, the frequency and democratic quality of elections in respect of participation, competition and legitimacy are not in decline. Second, repetitive electoral activities are contributing to democratisation through fostering the expansion and deepening of democratic values. Third, they are helping to solidify civil liberties in society. Elections are improving democracy's quality through their impact on democratic behaviour which in turn produces democratic values. Democratic quality takes root after the third election. Crucially, the unit of study encompasses six months preceding the actual election date and the following period during which any disputes over results will normally be resolved.
This book makes a notable contribution to the study of electoral politics, democratisation theory and the study of African politics. By furnishing evidence that repetitive elections really do matter in terms of advancing democratisation it offers a corrective to more dismissive views that arise from an excessive concern to avoid electoral fallacy. That concern has long been present in democratisation studies. This landmark study is already being cited in various literatures, not least because actors interested in international democracy promotion have seized on the grounds it offers for not writing off Africa and for continuing to offer practical support to the electoral process including, where necessary, to opposition participation there. The data sets on elections in the appendices are valuable to other researchers, as are the author's concluding reflections on the implications for future research.
Nevertheless, this timely reminder to bring the causal potential of elections back in should not lead us to abandon a focus on other political features. After all, for Lindberg democracy is conceived as but an attribute of the political system; and even increasingly democratic elections may be compatible with the persistence of clientelism, human rights abuse and other undemocratic practices. For this reason political science should investigate more widely the book's larger message that democratic institutions can create pro-democratic behaviour which in time may turn into democratic beliefs, including among political elites.
Peter Burnell
(University of Warwick)
This is an excellent book about late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century liberals and empire. Based on a wide range of material which Pitts handles impressively, the book begins from a broad but workable definition of liberalism as involving a notion of individual rights and an attempt to widen social sympathies. The book's main cast – Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville – all fall under this definition, and it is on this basis that the book's main argument is developed: late eighteenth-century suspicions of power and assumptions of superiority led to a fundamental scepticism about the justice and viability of dominating distant peoples, but due to central intellectual developments surrounding concepts like progress, improvement, civilisation, cultural difference and nationality, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a liberal turn to empire as illustrated in the writings of the Mills in Britain and Tocqueville in France. This argument is pursued in a most sophisticated manner, with vigour, historical sensitivity and a sharp eye for the questions of political theory involved in the awkward relationship between liberalism's commitment to equality and its frequent embrace of domination in various forms.
While Pitts’ analysis is admirable and balanced, more attention could have been paid to alternative liberal or radical anti-imperialist arguments available in the latter part of the period under scrutiny. As a result, the turn to empire appears sharper than is perhaps warranted. Pitts sensibly denies that there is any logical relation between liberalism and imperialism (p. 4, p. 255), yet her even-handed but ultimately unforgiving analysis of Mill's version of liberalism implies a strong connection between the two. Conversely, the interpretations of Smith and Burke's imperial suspicions and ethical sensibilities as sites for critique are very favourable. These readings will generate an interesting debate. Pitts deserves much credit for directing attention to liberalism's ability to negotiate difference in a context of empire and for her well-written, inspiring and thorough analysis.
Casper Sylvest
(University of Southern Denmark)
Monica Prasad provides an important and extremely detailed study on the rise of neoliberalism in Britain, France, Germany and the US. She offers an alternative, political-institutional explanation for variance in the degree of neoliberalisation, contrasting with existing ideational, class-based and globalisation-driven explanations. The four cases are chosen in order to compare the development of neoliberalism in countries which vary in terms both of the strength of organised labour (strong – UK, Germany; weak – US, France) and the adversarial nature of their political institutions (adversarial – UK, US; non-adversarial – France, Germany). The book argues that it is the adversarial nature of the UK and the US which best explains the more successful and complete rise of neoliberalism in those countries. In both cases, we witness a mobilised right-wing party (Republican in the US, Conservative in the UK) able to draw upon their adversarial political contexts in order to promote neoliberal policies that either reduced corporate regulation and tax revenues (in the case of the US) or switched from direct to indirect taxation and privatised key national industries (in the case of the UK). However, the strength of organised labour itself mediates the form and legitimation of these policies, witnessing an appeal to the ‘average voter’ in the US, in contrast to an explicit attack upon the trade union movement in the UK. While neoliberal policies were proposed in Germany (under Kohl) and France (especially during Chirac's period as prime minister from 1986 to 1988), these proposals were thwarted by the non-adversarial, ‘pro-growth’ nature of the domestic political compromise in each case. Again, the strength of organised labour mediated the (non-) impact of neoliberalism in these cases. Thus, in ‘strong-labour’ Germany we witness the important role played by the labour wing of the CDU in thwarting attempts by the business wing of the same party to impose a neoliberal agenda. In contrast, in France it is the entrenched attitudes of the technocrats of the French administrative system that in large part explain the absence of a successful neoliberal agenda.
This book represents a significant and powerful contribution to an ever-more sophisticated comparative political economy literature. It combines rich empirical detail with sophisticated analysis, skilfully and persuasively illustrating the flaws in some of the alternative accounts within the existing literature. Greater discussion of the sustainability of the resistance to neoliberalism observed in France and Germany during the 1980s, particularly in the light of continued economic outperformance by the UK and US since the early 1990s, might have bolstered the argument further still.
David Bailey
(Aston University)
This edited collection critically contributes to feminist and transnationalist theories of citizenship through collating diverse and empirically rich analyses of the experiences of women migrants. The scope of the book is wide, incorporating interdisciplinary case studies that examine the experiences of various migrants (including refugees, asylum seekers and (im)migrants in a variety of occupations), from various regions of origin (including the Caribbean, China, the Philippines, Somalia and South Asia). In addition, the collection analyses women's experiences in various receiving states (including Australia, Britain, Kenya and Aotearoa New Zealand), while maintaining a particular emphasis on Canada. The primary focus of the book is on women migrants, but the contributors largely adopt a gender perspective in their individual chapters. The case for such an approach is persuasively made, with the gendered complexities of ‘what happens’ to various (im)migrant women who cross ‘local, national and transnational borders’ well charted throughout (p. 4).
This is an absorbing book that will interest researchers of gender, migration and/or citizenship at various levels, and across various disciplines. From Preibisch and Santamaría's analysis of the Canadian seasonal agricultural workers programme to Dobrowolsky and Lister's analysis of social exclusion initiatives in Britain, the collection shows how gendered, racialised and class-based power relations mark women's (and men's) experiences of migration and citizenship. The collection also shows how migrants resist global restructuring and state-based discriminations across various geographical locations. From Tastsoglou's analysis of migrant identifications in the Maritime region of Canada to Abdi's analysis of the survival strategies of Somali women in Kenyan refugee camps, a range of chapters focus on the ways in which women migrants actively contest discriminatory and oppressive relations. In drawing these various pieces together, the book contributes to a growing body of migration and citizenship research concerned with challenging oppression in terms that empower the marginalised.
Somewhat disappointing, however, is the editors’ failure to provide a concluding chapter that highlights the distinctiveness of the book's contribution. While they succeed in bringing together diverse pieces that talk to the intersecting themes of gender, migration and citizenship, the editors do not adequately explore how ‘crossing boundaries and making connections’ (p. 1) enables feminists to ‘rethink global citizenship’ in terms that ‘improve the immigrant experience’ (p. xii). Tastsoglou, Abdi and others touch on this issue, but the editors miss an ideal opportunity to assess the critical potential of feminist and postnationalist movements toward a more egalitarian world.
Vicki Squire
(University of Birmingham)
In Regimes and Repertoires Charles Tilly raises three ambitious questions: how do political regimes change and vary? How do the means of contention among people and between people and their rulers in different regimes change and vary? And what interrelations exist between regime change and variation and the nature of contentious politics?
This book is both a continuation and contribution to the approach and themes Tilly fostered in previous works. It maintains the method of the ‘structure, process and comparison’ and the theme of ‘contentious politics’. The structure here is regimes, ‘the prevailing relations among political actors, including the government’ (p. 19) or the political contexts in which contention, understood as ‘any individual's or group's making of consequential claims on another individual or group’ (p. 20), takes place. Each regime affords varying forms of repertoire – ‘clustered, learned, yet improvisational character of people's interactions’ (p. 35) in claim-making routines – depending on the form of contentious politics existing in that regime.
To account for variation in different regimes Tilly invites us conceptually to map regimes and contentious politics (ch. 2). Accordingly, two variables are proposed: governmental capacity or the degree to which government has the power to influence society in matters including centralisation of coercion, adjudication, or resource distribution; and democracy, the extent to which people have political rights and the ability to influence governmental attitude. In mapping these regimes, Tilly masterfully compares regimes as different as India, Morocco, Somalia or the United States. As is usual for Tilly, processes and time matter. Comparisons take place not only among cases but also within them, as the comparison of varying repertoires of contention in French history (ch. 3, pp. 35–40) illustrates.
The model suggested provides generic theoretical and analytical tools to situate and explain different themes such as ‘Collective Violence’ (ch. 6), ‘Revolutions’ (ch. 7) and ‘Social Movements’ (ch. 8), and covers a wide range of phenomena from South African apartheid, Rwandan genocide and Peruvian democratisation to terrorism and transnational social movements. In each of these cases, supplementary explanations in light of the generic model are provided to explain the theme at hand.
This book is at once theoretically illuminating, historically conscious and comprehensively insightful. The work will be of interest to a broad audience including students of comparative politics, political change and international relations. The chapter on collective violence should be of interest for analysts of ‘terrorism’, or ‘Terror’ (p. 137) as Tilly rightly terms it, as it situates this phenomenon within the broader category of collective violence and specific ‘repertoires of contention’. Students of state formation particularly will find the book very interesting. In reading the book, however, they might raise the question as to whether the concept of the state, which Tilly helped ‘bring in’ to the analysis three decades ago, has withered away in the quagmires of regimes and their repertoires of contention.
Adham Saouli
(University of St Andrews)
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